Russia’s Medvedev ‘Frustrated’ With Karabakh Impasse

MOSCOW — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is frustrated with the failure of his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts to reach a framework agreement on Nagorno-Karabakh and could stop organizing regular talks between them, one of his senior aides reportedly said on Monday.
“If Azerbaijan and Armenia fail to display soon a readiness to solve the accumulated problems, then we will consider this mediation mission to be over,” a leading Moscow daily, “Kommersant,” quoted a “high-ranking Kremlin source” as saying.
The unnamed official commented on the outcome of Medvedev’s latest trilateral negotiations with Presidents Serzh Sarkisian and Ilham Aliyev that were held in the Russian city of Kazan on Friday. Despite facing strong international pressure, the two leaders failed to agree on the basic principles of ending the Karabakh conflict put forward by Russia, the United States and France.
According to the Kremlin source, Medvedev told Aliyev and Sarkisian that he will organize another summit only if they “firmly express their readiness to sign up to the principles of the settlement.”
“Kommersant” cited an unnamed diplomat involved in the negotiating process as saying that the Kazan summit “unexpectedly rekindled disagreements which were long deemed settled by the mediators.” Some of them related to “the determination of Nagorno-Karabakh’s future status,” said the diplomat.
“But the problem is not so much these disagreements as the fact that the parties have repeatedly changed their positions. And that’s unacceptable,” he added.