Russia hopes that a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan will be signed as soon as possible, Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said on Friday.
"Russia has done everything possible and continues to do everything possible to ensure that a peace agreement is signed as quickly as possible within the framework of the trilateral agreement, which was once signed by the three heads of state. We hope that this will happen as soon as possible," Matviyenko said at a briefing after the session of the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly in St. Petersburg.
The briefing was also attended by Chairman of Azerbaijan's Milli Mejlis Sagiba Gafarova and Armenian National Assembly Speaker Alain Simonyan.
Baku and Yerevan have been disputing the belonging of Nagorno-Karabakh since February 1988, when it declared its secession from the Azerbaijani SSR.
The situation in the region escalated on September 27, 2020, with active fighting. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a joint statement on the full cessation of hostilities in Karabakh on November 9, 2020. According to the document, the Azerbaijani and Armenian sides stopped at the occupied positions, a number of areas came under Baku's control, and Russian peacekeepers were deployed along the line of contact and in the Lachin corridor. Subsequently, the leaders of the three countries adopted several other joint statements on the situation in the region. Last year, Azerbaijan and Armenia began discussing a peace treaty.
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Photo: Federation Council
Based on materials from TASS