Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said Friday he highly appreciates the role of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian peacekeepers in maintaining peace in Karabakh and hopes to continue this work next year.
"We very much appreciate your personal role in this issue, the role of high representatives of the Russian Federation government and, of course, the role of Russian peacekeepers to maintain peace in Karabakh. We hope that next year the work will continue and there will also be good results," the Azerbaijani leader said at a meeting with the Russian President in Sochi.
Aliyev believes that during the year of Russian peacekeepers' stay in Karabakh, there were no serious incidents in their zone of responsibility. "Since the deployment of Russian peacekeeping forces started on November 10 last year, there have been no serious incidents in the zone of responsibility of Russian peacekeepers during the year. There have been no military clashes, there have been no serious events, there have been sporadic incidents which are not some kind of systemic crisis," he said.
Touching upon the military clashes on the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Azerbaijani leader said that the incident makes it necessary "to take a very close look at all this and talk, including in a trilateral format, about how we can control and minimize risks and work towards a comprehensive settlement of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations".
Azerbaijani President stated that Baku is determined to develop relations with Moscow in all directions. "We have solved a lot of issues in the bilateral format, and today we characterize relations (with Russia) as the relations of strategic partners. <...> We are determined to increase the level of our relations in all directions", the Azerbaijani leader said.
Economic cooperation
Aliyev noted the great mutual interest in economic cooperation, including among business circles. According to him, bilateral relations cover a lot of spheres. The Azerbaijani president also reminded that Baku and Moscow are implementing seven road maps for cooperation in various sectors of the economy and in the humanitarian sphere.
Aliyev stressed that this week was "very revealing" in terms of the development of bilateral relations. "This week I received the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, yesterday evening I received the President of the (Russian) Academy of Sciences. Your official representative for humanitarian cooperation was in Baku all week with a very important mission to establish contacts between intellectuals, cultural figures of Azerbaijan and Armenia with the active participation of the Russian side," the Azerbaijani head of state said. He also added that recently Baku hosted a large business conference of the Russian Export Center and Roseximbank, which was attended by more than 30 Russian companies.
"Here one week is indicative enough to characterize only part of the directions of our cooperation," said the head of the Azerbaijani state.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: official website of the President of the Russian Federation
Based on materials from TASS