The attempts to change the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group are unacceptable. This is what Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia Sergey Lavrov declared during a joint press conference with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov in Moscow today.

In response to a question about prospects for the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Jeyhun Bayramov specifically stressed Baku's constructive position and added that Azerbaijan is committed to a political settlement. Bayramov recalled the existence of ‘serious legal and regulatory base, documents of international organizations’ and set aside the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and several other documents that were adopted after the adoption of those resolutions. “The negotiations need to be substantive, not an imitation,” Bayramov declared.

Lavrov agreed that it is necessary to be governed by the decisions adopted by the international community, including the resolutions of the UN Security Council that pursued an end of the war and the criteria for a peaceful settlement developed later. “The frameworks were developed within the scope of the OSCE, which set up the Minsk Group co-chaired by Russia, the US and France. The OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs and Armenia and Azerbaijan developed documents on approaches, but the sole purpose is to settle the conflict based on the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the OSCE Helsinki Final Act,” the Russian foreign minister stated.

According to Lavrov, the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs have scheduled visits to Baku and Yerevan next month and plan to organize a meeting of the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, but it is necessary to solve the situation and rule out incidents not only in the area of Karabakh and the areas of contact, but also on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border.