Armenia and Azerbaijan should seek opportunities for dialogue and ways to achieve a peace agreement, Russia hopes to accelerate this work, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday as he opened talks in Moscow with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov, TASS reported.

"Four trilateral statements have been approved. Work on them is underway, but, of course, we would like to speed it up. Whatever issues on the ground arise, as they say, I am convinced that we need to meet regularly, negotiate, build confidence and create conditions for all the issues to be settled," said the head of the Russian diplomatic mission.

He expressed regret over Armenian side's decision to cancel its participation in trilateral meeting of foreign ministers, which was supposed to take place in Moscow on Friday. "We agreed to hold a meeting of Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers on our territory today to continue discussions on the peace treaty. We were preparing for this event, but unfortunately at the last moment our Armenian colleagues refused to come to Moscow, explaining it by the situation on the ground. We regret that such an opportunity was missed," Lavrov said.