BAKU. May 27 (Interfax) - Azerbaijan hopes that the Armenian administration will show a political will in order to make progress at the Karabakh peace talks, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov told the newspaper Kommersant in an interview.
"First and foremost, we need the Armenian administration to show a political will in order to boost the negotiating process," Mammadyarov said.
Azerbaijan supports Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan who has said that Armenia will not be slowing down or stalling the negotiating process.
"We can only support this approach. Azerbaijan is definitively interested in the soonest settlement of the conflict. We still pin our hopes for a settlement on negotiations," Mammadyarov said.
He added that Azerbaijan did not view the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) as a possible party to the talks.
"Everything is quite simple: the Azerbaijani Republic is the vis-a-vis of the Republic of Armenia as the conflicting party. This format was endorsed by the Committee of Ministers of the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe on March 24, 1992. This is the reality. All the rest is either conjectures or attempts at stalling the settlement process under a far-fetched pretext," Mammadyarov said.
If Armenia really wants to settle the conflict, "it should [...] demonstrate a political will without delay and [to take] practical steps in this area," Mammadyarov said. "For our part, we will welcome this kind of approach, which should not just be declared but also put into life," he said.
The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia met twice in 2019, in Paris and Moscow, with the mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, Mammadyarov said.
"The dialogue continues in the existent format and with the existent agenda, which inspires cautious optimism," he said.
At the same time, Armenia has been making statements, which sound ambiguous and cast a shadow on the entire structure of the political settlement process, Mammadyarov said. "Regretfully, there are quite many of them. This causes our concern. So, I can tell you that last year was rather busy and contradictory," he said.
"Azerbaijan pins certain hopes on the common sense of the new administration of the neighbor country and their realization that Armenia cannot get out of the impasse it has driven itself into with the policy of aggression and occupation without settling relations with Azerbaijan and integrating into large-scale regional cooperation," Mammadyarov said.
Baku has taken a break in the settlement process so that the new Armenian administration could familiarize itself with details of the negotiating process, he said.
"The transitional stage is over, and talks have resumed on the level of leaders of the two countries and the foreign ministers," Mammadyarov said.
The Russian, French, and U.S. co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group are expected to visit the region this week.
"Their visit will start next week. The co-chairs will visit Armenia before they arrive in Azerbaijan. It is yet unknown whether the intermediaries will go to Nagorno-Karabakh," a diplomatic source told Interfax in Baku on May 24.
Representatives of the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministries said earlier that the co-chairs would travel to the region in late May.
"For now, we are planning that the co-chairs will visit the region in the end of the month. A meeting of the [foreign] ministers is on the agenda, but it still needs to be prepared," Mammadyarov told the Azerbaijani news agency Report on May 14. In his words, the proposal to arrange a foreign ministerial meeting has been made by a co-chair.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry confirmed the co-chairs' visit to the region.
The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia held their latest meeting pertaining to the Karabakh settlement process in Moscow in April. Mammadyarov said earlier that the United States had called for arranging another meeting of the two ministers.