The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan failed on Friday to agree a framework document to set the stage for a resolution of their two-decade conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azeri President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia's Serzh Sarksyan held talks in Russia on Nagorno-Karabakh, which Armenian-backed forces wrested from Azeri control in the deadliest war to break out during the fall of the Soviet Union two decades ago.
The two sides were under pressure from global powers to agree the Basic Principles, a 14-point framework document that would set the stage for talks on a peace settlement. The two leaders and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in a statement that the sides "confirmed reaching a mutual understanding on a range of issues whose resolution will help create conditions for an approval of the Basic Principles".
Analysts said the failure to reach an agreement at the meeting in Kazan, 720 km (450 miles) east of Moscow, increased risk of a new war in the Caucasus region, an oil and gas transit route, and marked the failure of Medvedev's peace initiative. "It's disappointing. The breakthrough that was hoped for, but was hard to achieve, has not happened," said Tom de Waal, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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