Yerevan: Please, don’t distort the reality about Nagorno-Karabakh

Please, don’t present Azerbaijan’s attitudes as the attitudes of the co-chair states, Armenia’s Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said during a meeting of the Eastern Partnership foreign ministers in Tbilisi in response to his Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov’s statement that Russia had made some proposal stipulating withdrawal of Armenians troops, repatriation of refugees and restoration of contacts between the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Nalbandian’s Spokesman Tigran Balayan quotes the Armenian foreign minister as saying that like everybody else, he was puzzled once again – just as he was during the Riga Summit, when Azerbaijan rejected a formula proposed by all the EU and Eastern Partnership members – a formula based on the settlement principles suggested by the OSCE co-chair states, Russia, the United States and France. The common approach of the co-chairs is that none of the principles can be implemented separately from the others.

“Please, don’t present Azerbaijan’s attitudes as the attitudes of the co-chair states, especially as the latter are specified in five generally known statements,” Nalbandian said.

He said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov did not say what Mammadyarov quoted him as saying. “He did not say anything like that to the Azerbaijani side. Please, don’t distort the reality,” Nalbandian said.