Russia hopes for achieving Azerbaijan-Armenia peace in Sochi meeting

Russia hopes that a three-party summit in Sochi on October 31 will make it possible to make some progress toward a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said on October 30.

"There still are a lot of problems. I think all of them will be discussed, including during tomorrow’s meeting in Sochi. We hope that it will make it possible to make some progress toward settling a range of issues, including a peace treaty," he said, TASS reports.

Commenting on Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s statement that a peace treaty could be signed by the yearend, Rudenko noted that "anything may happen in this life." "And once the [Armenian] leader said it, he may probably have some reasons for that," he added.

When asked by TASS whether the agenda will include Pashinyan’s statement on his readiness to sign a document extending the mandate of the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh for twenty more years, the deputy minister recalled that the peacekeepers had been deployed to the region in conformity with the trilateral statement by the Russian, Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders of November 9, 2020. "It has a clear mandate - five years. Five years have not yet passed," he noted.