Armenian and Azeri FMs Hold Talks in Vienna

VIENNA — The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan held late on Wednesday what they both described as “positive” negotiations on the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Edward Nalbandian and Elmar Mammadyarov met in Vienna in a bid to build on progress that was reportedly made at a recent Armenian-Azerbaijani summit. The meeting apparently lasted for several hours.

According to the Armenian Foreign Ministry, the two men began the talks in the presence of the U.S., Russian and French mediators and then spoke in a tete-a-tete format. A ministry statement said they discussed ways of implementing agreements reached by the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents at their last three meetings.

“Yesterday’s meeting with my Azerbaijani counterpart took place in a generally positive mood,” Nalbandian told on Thursday an annual session of the OSCE’s Ministerial Council also held in the Austrian capital. “Let’s see what developments will follow it.”

An Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman said, for his part, that Mammadyarov and Nalbandian engaged in “intensive and concrete discussions on existing proposals” to resolve the Karabakh conflict. “Elmar Mammadyarov said that the meeting was positive and constructive,” the official, Hikmet Hajiyev, was quoted by Azerbaijani news agencies as saying.

Hajiyev also said that Mammadyarov and Nalbandian agreed to meet again “in the second half of January 2018.” The Armenian Foreign Ministry likewise reported that their next talks will take place early next year.