The leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet tomorrow in Moscow

The leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan will hold a meeting tomorrow in Moscow to discuss compliance with the ceasefire agreement in Nagorno-Karabakh and to discuss "the next steps in solving the problems" that persist in the region, the Kremlin reported this Sunday.

"On the initiative of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, trilateral talks will be held in Moscow on 11 January between the President of Russia, the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliev, and the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashkin", the Russian Presidency said in a statement.

The note adds that, in addition to monitoring compliance with the ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia in November, they will pay special attention "to issues related to helping the population in the areas affected by the fighting and to the unblocking and development of economic-commercial and transport communications".

In addition to the tripartite meeting, bilateral talks have been scheduled between the Russian President and the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

This will be the third meeting between Aliev and Pashkin, who had met twice in the past (in 2019 and 2020), and the first after the bloody war in Nagorno-Karabakh last autumn.

The fighting in Karabakh, a mountainous enclave disputed by Armenians and Azerbaijanis since 1988, broke out on 27 September 2000 and claimed the lives of thousands of civilians and military personnel during 44 days of fighting.

Armenia had controlled the territory since its victory in the conflict that erupted with the fall of the USSR, after which a fragile ceasefire came into effect, broken on numerous occasions, though, with the exception of the four-day war in 2016, never on a large scale.

Under the agreement that put an end to the war, Armenia lost 70 percent of the territories it had occupied since 1994, and this has triggered mass protests against the government in Yerevan.