YEREVAN. - Progress shouldn’t be expected in the talks over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement as long as there is a threat of resumption of military actions.

Deputy Foreign Minister of Armenia, Shavarsh Kocharyan, said the aforementioned at a press-conference Wednesday

According to him, the Armenian side has never avoided meetings, of course, always expecting that they should be productive. “The productivity can be judged by the fact that there is no progress in the talks. Moreover, progress cannot be expected unless the agreements reached in Vienna and Saint Petersburg are implemented. It cannot be expected as long as there is a possibility of war and as long as there is no confidence, firing continuing on the border,” the Deputy Minister noted, adding that “first of all, the ceasefire agreements of 1994  and 1995 should be implemented, which mention about the incident investigation mechanisms.”

“Thus, this is the direct responsibility of Azerbaijan. But Azerbaijan is trying to torpedo their implementation,” Kocharyan noted.

Commenting on the threat from Azerbaijan, Kocharyan noted that the talks are making no headway, since this country uses them for covering its policy—propaganda built on conflict falsification, which turns it into a territorial dispute creating grounds for military settlement.  

In his words, Azerbaijan thought that the time worked in their favor, their military budget increasing, but the April developments showed that this is not so. “They showed that the Azerbaijani blitzkrieg failed. It’s another issue that we also had weaknesses, which we are correcting. If those events recur, the result will be much serious for Azerbaijan,” Kocharyan noted.

In his words, the circumstance that Azerbaijan torpedoes the implementation of the agreements on introducing incident investigation mechanisms indicates who exactly their initiator is. “The implementation of the Vienna agreements is the basis for continuing the talks,” Kocharyan said.