YEREVAN. – National Assembly (NA) of Armenia Vice President Eduard Sharmazanov, who also heads the NA Armenia-Greece Parliamentary Friendship Group and has traveled to Athens on a working visit, on Thursday met with ex-Foreign Minister Evangelos Venizelos of Greece.

The interlocutors underscored the need to expand parliamentary cooperation between the two countries, and to support one another within parliamentary platforms.

Deputy speaker of the Armenian parliament considered it unacceptable that Azerbaijan is attempting to destabilize the region, and stressed that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict should be resolved solely through peace. In Sharmazanov’s words, Azerbaijan’s efforts to bypass the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs and attempts to transfer the conflict resolution to other platforms are reprehensible.

Venizelos, for his part, noted that an adoption—by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE)—of two such draft resolutions would not be in the interests of a peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict, and they would run contrary to the respective position of the Minsk Group co-chairs.

Two anti-Armenian resolutions will be put to a vote at the forthcoming PACE Winter Session. They are PACE MP Robert Walter’s (UK) report entitled “Escalation of Violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and Other Occupied Territories of Azerbaijan,” and PACE MP Milica Marković’s (Bosnia and Herzegovina) report about Sarsang Reservoir in Nagorno-Karabakh, and entitled “Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water.”