Russia Vows Fresh Push For Karabakh Settlement

22, February 2006
Armenia Liberty
By Emil Danielyan and Ruzanna Stepanian

President Robert Kocharian will be invited to the Kremlin for urgent talks on Nagorno-Karabakh, in what his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin presented as an attempt to salvage the Karabakh peace process during an official visit to Azerbaijan on Wednesday.
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Putin announced the diplomatic initiative after talks in Baku with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev. [...].
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Putin would not say if that means he and Aliev have reached important agreements on the issue. He assured reporters that Moscow will not seek to impose solutions on the conflicting parties.[...]
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[...] French, Russian and U.S. diplomats co-chairing the OSCE Minsk Group are scheduled to meet in Washington early next month to decide on their next steps. The United States seems particularly keen to prevent a loss of what it regards as the best chance of Karabakh peace in years, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reportedly discussing the issue with Aliev by phone last week.

{Armenia claims that the talks} collapsed because of Aliev’s last-minute rejection of a peace plan put forward by the Minsk Group. At the heart of the plan is the idea of holding a referendum in Karabakh that would almost certainly formalize Armenian control over the disputed territory.

[...]. It is not clear if the United States and France were informed about the announced Russian push for Karabakh peace beforehand.[...]
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Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.