MFA: Russia ready for further efforts to achieve peace in South Caucasus

Spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova has said that Russia is ready to continue making efforts to achieve peace and stability in the South Caucasus.

Zakharova made these remarks at a briefing while answering a question from News.ru, Caliber.Az reports.

She noted that Moscow made a decisive contribution to the cessation of hostilities between Azerbaijan and Armenia in autumn 2020.

“We have always paid special attention to the humanitarian issues related to the settlement of the situation between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia actively rendered assistance in searching for missing people, transferring maps of minefields, and is ready to continue making these efforts, which lead to achieving peace and stability in the South Caucasus,” Zakharova said.

The spokesperson added that both the content and atmosphere during the final press conference led by Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan cause regret, Trend reports.

“Instead of drawing objective conclusions, and in particular, conclusions from Armenia’s own mistakes and miscalculations, another attempt has been made to place all responsibility on Russia. This has no basis because these mistakes are not ours. Unfortunately, these are Yerevan’s mistakes. All this applies both to the relations with our side and in the context of normalisation of the Armenia-Azerbaijan relations. There is the distortion of facts in almost every paragraph of these statements,” she said.

Zakharova noted that Mirzoyan’s interpretation of the situation related to Yerevan’s appeal to Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) in September 2022 is also false. If the Armenian side had not dragged on the issue, the CSTO mission would have successfully operated in Armenia, but instead, Armenia invited the EU observers, she said.

She noted that the main task of the EU mission is to collect intelligence information.

During a press conference held a few days ago, Mirzoyan called on the Russian side to “correctly retell the chronology of events, as well as present a cause and effect relationship, rather than to blame Armenia”.