Ruben Vardanyan (Minister of State of Artsakh - ed.) has nothing to do with the Russian Federation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following a meeting with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov.

"We all have to proceed from the fact that the situation is multilateral, the public opinion of all the parties involved, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Karabakh, and also Russian, which is also important. Especially since from different sources, I will not specify, there are constant reproaches, more than unfounded against the Russian peacekeepers, who work in very difficult conditions. Taking into account the recriminations from both sides and taking into account the necessity of strict observance of the procedures stipulated by trilateral agreements, as the minister (Bayramov - Ed.) said.

Karabakh - the whole problem is inherited from the Soviet Union, first of all, but at the moment the decisive point is the collapse of the Soviet Union. The mines in question are developed since the Soviet times. In other words, during the Soviet period, when the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast was part of the Azerbaijan SSR, enterprises were working there, but now they have apparently turned into businessmen, which, as I understand it, are still there. So it is part of the inherited problem, and to solve it finally, of course, is possible only through a peace treaty and putting a bold end to this legal issue. Of course that doesn't mean that we must do nothing, and as Jeyhun Azizovich mentioned, about a couple of weeks ago, thanks to the mediation efforts of Russian peacekeepers an agreement was reached to organize a visit of a group of environmentalists to one of the mines on the territory of Karabakh. In order to see, to be able to reassure public opinion. Unfortunately, this agreement was broken, and not through the fault of the Azerbaijani side, not through the fault of the Russian peacekeepers... It was said that the leadership of Karabakh did not want to receive such a delegation at the moment, to allow such a delegation to visit the territory of that region. I do not know who would be involved in this. Jeyhun Azizovich mentioned Mr. Vardanyan... Mr. Vardanyan has nothing to do with the Russian Federation. At his request, a presidential decree was signed the other day, he is no longer a Russian citizen. And we have not had, we do not have and we are not going to have any case related to his decision to go to Karabakh and participate in any political life there... But I will stress once again, the main thing is to close those residual issues, those processes that go back to the Soviet times. And when our colleagues from Armenia and Azerbaijan met both in Prague and then in Washington they adopted statements. By the way, it was also against the background of Yerevan's claims to Baku, but it didn't prevent the Armenian minister from going to Prague, Brussels and Washington and doing concrete work without preconditions... It is so to say for the history comment. But in these documents, in my opinion, for the first time it was written in Prague on behalf of both Azerbaijan and Armenia that the work on the peace treaty will be based on a number of key principles, including the UN Charter and the Alma-Ata Declaration of December 1991. With such a statement, and we also talked about it today, I just do not see any big problems with finally getting down to preparing a peace treaty professionally, because with such a statement, all its components are in place."