BAKU. June 7 (Interfax) - The European Union and United States made a mistake when, during the active rapprochement of the Armenian-Turkish relations in 2009, they took this process out of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict context, former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Matthew Bryza said.
Settling the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and mending the Armenian-Turkish relations are interrelated, Bryza said on Friday at "EU-Azerbaijan: Security and Integration" international conference in Baku.
Bryza said that having progress in one direction would bring progress in the other and that everything was interrelated.
Armenia and Turkey still have no diplomatic ties. The 1915 events in the Ottoman Empire remain the stumbling block in the Armenian-Turkish relations. A number of counties have recognized the genocide of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915 as a result of which, according to various data, over 1.5 million people were killed. Armenia wants Turkey to acknowledge the genocide and Turkey refuses to do so.
Official Ankara demands that the Karabakh conflict is resolved on the basis of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.