French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement he had spoken on the phone successively with the prime minister of Armenia and the president of Azerbaijan about the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) and had proposed a new method to restart talks within the OSCE Minsk Group, Reuters reported.

Macron said work would start from Friday evening, as he upped his efforts to broker mediation in his role as co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group.

He also reiterated his call for a ceasefire.