Full-fledged negotiations provide for the involvement of three parties - Artsakh, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, which signed the cease-fire agreement in May 1994.

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic/NKR), Masis Mayilian, stated the abovementioned at his year-end press conference on Monday. 

To the remark that, in late December 2017, the Special Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office for the South Caucasus, Günther Bächler, stated in an interview posted on the OSCE official website that they have some principles about a final status on the table, but no real negotiation architecture, for the conflict between Azerbaijan and Karabakh, responded as follows:

“It is this format that is enshrined in the final document of the CSCE/OSCE Budapest Summit. Accordingly, we believe that efforts should be exerted to resume the trilateral Artsakh-Azerbaijan-Armenia negotiations, and not to create a new negotiation architecture.

“It should also be noted that the lack of full-format negotiations is a derivative of Azerbaijani leadership’s lack of political will to achieve a final settlement of the conflict. By impeding the resumption of the full-format negotiations with the direct and full-fledged participation of Artsakh, refusing to implement the peacemaking initiatives to strengthen the ceasefire, and pursuing a consistent policy of escalating the conflict, Azerbaijan deliberately protracts the establishment of lasting peace in the region.

“In this regard, it is worth recalling that the full-format negotiations were undermined in due time as a result of similar manipulations by the Azerbaijani party, which, at the peak of the development of the Great Political Agreement, insisted on the elaboration of settlement principles as a basis for continuing the negotiations. Now Azerbaijan proposes to abandon the discussion of the principles of the conflict settlement, which it initiated, and to start some kind of structured negotiations. Such inconsistency of the Azerbaijani authorities raises no doubts that this initiative, like the previous ones, is just a trick, resulting from their unwillingness to recognize the right to self-determination realized by the people of Artsakh as a basis for achieving a final settlement of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Karabakh.”