The OSCE Minsk Group’s role in Karabakh conflict settlement is to create the conditions, both on the ground and politically, for the sides to work towards the resolution of their dispute, OSCE head Lamberto Zannier said in an interview with The Voice of Russia.

“The Minsk Group in particular has now for many years put forward proposals and elaborated plans and they have been submitted to the parties,” he said.

Zannier noted that the Minsk Group has reached at some point the stages where the agreement, at least on a set of basic principles, seem to be just around the corner.

“I remember Russian President at some point engaging a number of summits with the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan. At a summit in Kazan last year, if I’m not wrong, it looked like they were really close to the first step of agreement. But then for a number of reasons this didn’t happen and the sides were blaming each other,” Zannier recalled.

He said OSCE can only help the sides to find a solution but not impose it.

“If there is no political agreement the next best thing we can do is to help manage the conflict on the ground. We are monitoring the ceasefire line, we propose confidence building measures, we propose the creation of mechanisms to investigate the incidents. But the problem, especially in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, is very often that these proposals are blocked for different reasons by one side or another. So, sometimes even on the ground we struggle – we would like to do much more but we are blocked from doing more.”