European Friends of Armenia strongly welcomes the concrete results achieved in this weekend’s trilateral summit in Sochi and now calls for their word-by-word implementation, under the lead-management of the OSCE, reads the statement issued by the organization.

“Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan should be congratulated, as this is another concrete achievement of the peace negotiations in recent years, following in particular the presentation of the so-called Madrid Principles and the l’Aquila declaration on July 2009. At the time, this good result was watered down by the unwillingness to accept the Madrid Principles as a whole, which so far only Armenia is ready to do. This time, Azerbaijan has the chance to regain its credibility by co-operating with the OSCE Minsk Group fully in the implementation of the points all parties agreed to in Soch,” said Michael Kambeck, EuFoA Secretary General.

Commenting on points of a joint declaration adopted in Sochi, Sargis Ghazaryan, EuFoA Senior Research Fellow stressed Armenia and Azerbaijan have now given a de-facto mandate to the OSCE Minsk Group to fully investigate each future incident on the Line of Contact and this will require an increase of their currently miniscule observation mission staff.

“If fully implemented, this could be the confidence building step we have for so long been hoping for,” he said.