Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on Tuesday said there was “a good basis” for resolving a long-running conflict with Armenia after talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev near Moscow.
“It seems to us that there is now a good basis for a resolution of the conflict, which would fit with the interests of all states and would be based on the principles of international law,” Aliyev said.
“If the conflict is resolved in the near future, I am sure that there will be new perspectives for regional cooperation,” Aliyev said.
Aliyev also expressed his concern over the situation in the region following Russia’s war in Georgia, saying that conflict “should be resolved in a peaceful way, through dialogue, by finding common points and based on mutual respect.”
Aliyev visited Medvedev at his residence near Moscow for talks on last month’s conflict in Georgia and on Azerbaijan’s conflict with its neighbour Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia and Azerbaijan remain in a tense stand-off over the enclave, which ethnic Armenian forces seized in the early 1990s in a war that killed nearly 30,000 people and forced another million on both sides to flee their homes.
A ceasefire was signed between the two former Soviet republics in 1994 but the dispute remains unresolved after more than a decade of negotiations, and shootings between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in the region are common.