KAZAN, Russia (RFE/RL) — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is frustrated with the failure of his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts to reach a framework agreement on Nagorno-Karabagh and could stop organizing regular talks between them, one of his senior aides reportedly said last Monday.
“If Azerbaijan and Armenia fail to display soon a readiness to solve the accumulated problems, then we will consider this mediation mission to be over,” a leading Moscow daily, Kommersant, quoted a high-ranking Kremlin source as saying.
The unnamed official commented on the outcome of Medvedev’s latest trilateral negotiations with Presidents Serge Sargisian and Ilham Aliyev that were held here last Friday. Despite facing strong international pressure, the two leaders failed to agree on the basic principles of ending the Karabagh conflict put forward by Russia, the United States and France.
The Kazan meeting was the ninth Armenian-Azerbaijani summit hosted by Medvedev in the last three years, a fact highlighting the Russian president’s central role in the Karabagh peace process.
According to the Kremlin source, Medvedev told Aliyev and Sargisian that he will organize another summit only if they “firmly express their readiness to sign up to the principles of the settlement.”
The conflicting parties blamed each other for the failure of the Kazan talks that lasted for more than three hours. In particular, Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian claimed that Aliyev scuttled an agreement by demanding “about a dozen” last-minute changes in the latest version of the basic principles.
