Levon Melik-Shahnazaryan: Baku expected “a schedule of Armenian troops withdrawal from Karabakh” to be signed in Almaty

PanARMENIAN.Net - The meeting between Armenian and Azerbaijani Foreign Ministers in Almaty was expected with interest, an Armenian expert said.

“First, it was the first ministerial meeting of the St. Petersburg presidential talks. Second, it had to take place in Kazakhstan, a Turkic state, whose ‘peaceful efforts’ resulted in Azerbaijan’s aggression against NKR in 1991. Third, prior to the meeting Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov made a number of provocative statements taken by many Azeri politicians as a granted,” Levon Melik-Shahnazaryan told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter.

“The expectations for the meeting were quite different. Baku expected “a schedule of withdrawal of Armenian troops from Karabakh” to be signed. Yerevan expected a regular fruitless meeting. Both sides were wrong. No schedule was signed (a politician should be absolutely ignorant to expect this). At the same time, Sergei Lavrov, Bernard Kouchner and James Steinberg reminded Azerbaijan of its destructive policy through mentioning and rejecting Baku's ungrounded claims in their statement,” he said.

The culmination of the statement is the sentence reading that “additional actions by the sides are needed to reinforce the ceasefire of 1994 and to create a more favorable atmosphere for further political dialogue and reaching agreements,” according to Melik-Shahnazaryan.

“The matter concerns withdrawal of snipers from the frontline and Baku will have to think about it. Furthermore, mentioning the ceasefire agreement signed in 1994 by Armenia, Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan, the OSCE Minsk Group showed readiness to re-engage NKR in talks,” he resumed.