Russia Continues to Fulfill Its Obligations to Settle Nagorno-Karabakh Issue

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia continues to fulfill its obligations to resolve the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh by participating in trilateral agreements with Azerbaijan and Armenia, conducting painstaking work with both Baku and Yerevan, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.

Since December 12, the Lachin corridor, which connects Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, has been blocked by a group of Azerbaijanis described by Baku as environmental activists. According to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, the corridor's blockade violates the ceasefire declaration brokered by Russia between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020. The document delegated control of the Lachin corridor to Russian peacekeepers deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh. In late December, Pashinyan said that the peacekeepers allegedly did not fulfill their obligations regarding control over the corridor.

On Monday, the US State Department said that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a telephone conversation with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, called on Baku to redouble efforts in bilateral peace negotiations with Armenia and urged for an "immediate reopening" of the Lachin corridor to resume the movement of commercial goods and thus reduce the risk of a humanitarian crisis.

"Russia, as one of the parties to the trilateral agreements and documents that were signed two years earlier, continues to fulfill its obligations and continues a very, very painstaking and difficult work with both Armenia and Azerbaijan," Peskov told reporters, commenting on Blinken's remarks.

On January 18, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the issue of the Lachin corridor in Nagorno-Karabakh could be resolved in the near future. The top diplomat noted that Moscow proposed to Baku and Yerevan a mechanism according to which Russian peacekeepers would have the authority under the trilateral agreement to control movement through the Lachin corridor and, among other things, to check vehicles for prohibited non-humanitarian and non-civilian goods in them.