Leaders Of Armenia, Azerbaijan Meet In Switzerland

Leaders Of Armenia, Azerbaijan Meet In Switzerland

RFE/RL- Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev have met in Bern in a bid to settle their longstanding conflict over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

No details of the results of the meeting on December 19 were immediately available.

The meeting, at the invitation of Switzerland and comes amid heightened tensions as clashes erupt regularly along the border shared by the two states.

The co-chairs of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group were also in Bern for the presidents’ meeting.

Ahead of the meeting, the U.S., Russian, and French mediators said on December 18 that they hoped that Sarkisian and Aliyev would agree to boost the cease-fire regime and revive the protracted search for a compromise peace deal. 

The private meeting between the two presidents was to be followed by a meeting in an expanded format with the participation of the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers, the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, and the personal representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office Andrzej Kasprzyk.

The last meeting between the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents took place in Paris on October 27, 2014

OSCE mediators recently warned that “the status quo has become unsustainable” over Nagorno-Karabakh.

One Azerbaijani and three Armenian soldiers were killed near Nagorno-Karabakh on December 17 and 18 in an escalation of violence.