A regular meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan is likely to take place in January 2018, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the OSCE Alexander Lukashevich said.

The Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the OSCE agreed with the view that the year 2017 was extremely important in terms of avoiding dangerous escalation in the region and restoring negotiations dynamics.

“We absolutely welcome the contacts of the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan who  worked quite hard this year which also allowed us to intensively work at the OSCE Ministerial Council, where a joint statement of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairing states was adopted,” Lukashevich said during a press conference on Monday.

Lukashevich said the meeting of the presidents in Geneva is very encouraging. According to him, there are expectations that the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet in the near future, perhaps in January.

“We support this trend and believe that the trio of co-chairs and the personal representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office deserve every support, and it is, in fact, in a fairly broad context, despite the persisting disagreements between the parties,” the official said.

According to him, these contradictions, unfortunately, prevented a number of ministerial agreements on various aspects of OSCE activities.

Russia regrets that the situation so far does not allow to reach solutions in a wider context, for example on  the economic aspect where the sides of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have their own views , the diplomat said.

At the same time, he stressed that the trend of the year is encouraging, and Austria is passing Italy a good state of affairs. Russia preserves the most important function of influencing and helping friends in Baku and Yerevan to find a solution, Lukashevich concluded.