By Edmond Y. Azadian
By now all observers have lost count how many times the Minsk Group co-chairs have visited Armenia and Azerbaijan. Perhaps even the participants cannot figure out the number of their meetings held in the two countries at loggerheads.
The subject of today’s counting exercise, tripartite meetings between the presidents of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, has a smaller number. Indeed the sixth meeting between the three presidents was held on June 17 at St. Petersburg.
At the conclusion of that meeting, information was released, but actions spoke even louder. It is obvious that the three presidents have been spinning their wheels to no avail. If something substantive
needed to be achieved, six meeting were more than sufficient.
Following the St. Petersburg meeting, Armenia’s Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian and the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson have tried to give a positive spin to the meeting, which was later disproved by the third party’s actions — Aliyev’s provocative act against Karabagh.
Nalbandian was the only high-level diplomat to speak to the reporters. Russia and Azerbaijan had relegated that task to third-level functionaries, indicating clearly the relative importance of the meeting to the respective participants.