As can be found out today from two official sources - the press service of the Armenian President and the Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group from the United States, James Warlick – the event of the year, as part of the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the meeting of Azerbaijani and Armenian Presidents Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan, will be held tomorrow in Vienna. Ilham Aliyev will arrive in the capital of Austria, after he finishes an official visit to Ukraine today. Sargsyan will fly to Vienna directly from Yerevan.
In an interview to VK the vice -president of the Union "Consulting- Analysis- PR", Ismail Agakishiyev, said that the meeting of the presidents is vital for the continuation of a peaceful settlement of the Nagorno -Karabakh conflict.
"What are my expectations from the meeting? As we know, the issue to be discussed is very complicated, especially as people occupying opposite positions will talk to each other. For this reason, if they agree to continue the talks and the next meeting, this will mean a certain understanding and would be a great result of those negotiations. And in the course of further meetings some progress in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be achieved," Agakishiyev said.
In turn, the executive director of the Center for Political Science "North-South", editor-in-chief of VK Alexei Vlasov, expressed the view that the upcoming meeting between the two presidents "is unlikely to be fatal", agreeing with Agakishieva that the arrangement for the next meeting will be the "serious success" of the negotiations.
"The fact is that after 2011 the dynamics of meetings between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan has declined markedly. Under these conditions, persistent petty conflicts on the line of separation of Nagorno-Karabakh created psychological and information tension, while the mediators could not come to agreement on who should take over the functions of chief moderator of the Karabakh settlement when the Russian government does not take part in this mission", Vlasov said.
"At the moment there is no clear understanding of how to address this issue. However, after completion of the electoral cycles in Armenia and Azerbaijan, there is some hope that Baku and Yerevan will listen to the opinion of intermediaries and return to the negotiating table, despite the fact that no innovations after the announcement of the updated Madrid principles of the Minsk Group were presented”, the editor-in-chief of VK said.
"Interestingly, in the Turkish media a few days ago there was information that the resumption of the negotiating process was to coincide with the resumption of negotiations with Yerevan and Ankara over the so-called protocols. The ratification of these documents has been shelved, not least because of the desire of Turkey to discuss the topic of opening borders simultaneously with concessions from Armenia in the Karabakh process. Currently, this information is presented as a newspaper duck, if we take as the basis an immediate return of several regions around Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan. But the issue of synchronous resumption of dialogue between Baku and Yerevan and Yerevan and Ankara does not seem a fantastic dream. But at the moment it is likely that the main outcome of the meeting between Aliyev and Sargsyan will be the agreement on a new meeting to be held in the near future. If the terms of a new summit will remain uncertain, it will be safe to say that the resumption of a new round of negotiations has not yet led to any concrete results”, Alexei Vlasov summed up.
Looking back, as VK reported, a week earlier, when the date of the meeting of Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan was still unknown, experts from Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia agreed that the talks in Vienna would be "a landmark event after two years of silence".
