Armenia Blames Azerbaijan for Failure of Kazan Summit

YERVAN — Armenia has blamed Azerbaijan for the failure of their summit meeting in Kazan, saying that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev scuttled a framework agreement on Nagorno-Karabakh with last-minute demands. The countries spearheading international efforts on brokering a solution to the conflict have not yet expressed their attitude to the failure of the summit.
“There was no breakthrough at Kazan because Azerbaijan proved unprepared to accept the latest version of the basic principles [of the conflict’s resolution] proposed by the three co-chairs [of the OSCE Minsk Group,]” Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said after the talks on Friday night.
Speaking to journalists, Nalbandian said that Aliyev presented “about a dozen changes” in the basic principles which were unacceptable for the Armenian side represented by President Serzh Sarkisian. He did not specify those changes.
Official Baku did not explicitly deny these claims, with Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov saying later on Saturday that Yerevan rejected an earlier version of the basic principles that were first formally submitted to the two sides in Madrid in 2007.
“For some reason, the Armenian side was silent when Azerbaijani announced the acceptance of an updated version of the Madrid document that was officially presented by the [OSCE] Minsk Group co-chairs in Athens in 2009,” Mammadyarov said, according to the Trend news agency. “It is now talking about one of the many versions of a working document based on the updated Madrid document.”
Mammadyarov claimed that the Kazan meeting failed to live up to expectations because “the Armenian side requires maximum concessions from Azerbaijan.” Nonetheless, he did say that he “got the impression” that both the Armenian and Azarbaijani presidents intend to continue “working intensively” toward finding a definitive solution.