STEPANAKERT. May 18 (Interfax) - The self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh republic (NKR) positively views the outcomes of a meeting between Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Vienna through the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs' mediation and believes the logic of the Karabakh conflict settlement process requires that the tripartite format of the negotiations be reinstated.
Stepanakert "supports the agreement reached at the meeting to complete the work on an OSCE incident investigation mechanism, to expand the office of the OSCE chairperson-in-office's personal representative, and to continue exchanging information on those missing under the International Committee of the Red Cross aegis," the NKR foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
"We also share the position of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs (Russia, the U.S., and France) on ruling out any chance that the conflict can be resolved in a military way and insisting on the need to observe the 1994 and 1995 ceasefire agreements," it said.
These agreements, which put an end to large-scale combat actions and so provided an opportunity to look for ways for a peaceful settlement of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict, were reached owing to the full-format involvement of all the three parties, i.e. Azerbaijan, the Nagorno-Karabakh republic, and Armenia, in the negotiations, the foreign ministry said.
"The logic of the settlement process requires that the negotiations on seeking the final settlement of the conflict precisely in this tripartite format be reinstated," it said.