The presence of such weapons as Iskander definitely plays a stabilizing role in maintaining the military and political balance of forces in our region.

President of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), Bako Sahakyan, stated the aforementioned in an interview with Gazeta.ru.

“The reason is the aggressive and destructive policy of official Baku “thanks” to which force is unfortunately the most efficient mechanism of maintaining peace and stability in our region,” the President said.

In his words, Russia plays a very important and remarkable role here: “Exactly thanks to its efforts and direct participation, peace was established and open-ended ceasefire agreement was signed between Artsakh, Azerbaijan and Armenia in 1994. Throughout all the years of co-chairmanship in the OSCE Minsk Group, Russia has been actively participating in the negotiation process, adhering to the constructive approach to the settlement of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict, like the other co-chairs.

As to the conflict settlement, this first and foremost requires restoring the fully-fledged format of talks with the participation of NKR, and, as I already mentioned, Baku should abandon its misanthropic and aggressive actions disrupting the negotiation process, as well as the peace and stability in the region,” Sahakyan stressed.

Responding to the question as to whether there might ever be peace between the Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples, Sahakyan said: “You know, the entire Artsakh people and I remember not only the beginning of the conflict but we have also been up to now living in a situation, where the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict has not yet been resolved. But I am still confident that the peace between our peoples is still possible. There is simply no alternative to this. We do not make aggressive, chauvinistic and militaristic statements, and we have no such policy. However, official Baku unfortunately behaves exactly the other way round. It is exactly the destructive position of the Azerbaijani authorities, which is the only obstacle on the way to comprehensive settlement of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh relations.”