Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s opening remarks at talks with Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan, Moscow, July 25, 2023

Esteemed Mr Mirzoyan,

My friends,

We are grateful to you for accepting our invitation to come to Moscow for organising another trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia. Before this meeting, we have a good opportunity to have a bilateral conversation and discuss both Russia-Armenia relations and various regional issues.

We certainly are paying special attention (as we have been in the past few days) to settling the situation with the Lachin corridor and Nagorno-Karabakh in general. We want to facilitate the resolution of the acute humanitarian problems that have emerged there. The Russian peacekeeping contingent has every opportunity to do this, but it is difficult without the cooperation of the parties.

We are ready to promote the implementation of the entire package of trilateral agreements between the presidents of Azerbaijan and Russia and the Prime Minister of Armenia, which were achieved in the past few years.

We consider it important to move ahead on all tracks of Armenia-Azerbaijan normalisation, including the unblocking of transport and economic connections, resolving delimitation issues and developing dialogue between public organisations and experts. We are ready to do all we can for this purpose.

We are hoping to especially emphasise the Baku-Yerevan draft peace treaty. We have a number of considerations that, we hope, will be of some use.

We will discuss the bilateral agenda, as well as the CSTO, the CIS, and the EAEU.

We have many interesting joint economic and cultural projects. Our trade continues growing. We have started holding Russian Culture Days in Armenia every year. This event was again held in June of this year. This is an important contribution to our joint efforts to strengthen our allied relations and a common humanitarian and language space in the interests of our people.

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