MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday hosted the leaders of regional rivals Armenia and Azerbaijan for talks marking the first anniversary of a Moscow-brokered peace deal that ended fighting in the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh. In the southern city of Sochi, Putin held a bilateral meeting with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev. Then the Russian president met with Aliyev and Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan together, and after that he said he would have a separate bilateral meeting with Pashinyan. Opening his meeting with both of the leaders, Putin said a lot has been done over the past year, but “not all the issues are yet resolved.” He pointed to repeated clashes on the border between the two nations that resulted in multiple casualties. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decades-old dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that lies within Azerbaijan but was under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.

Source: Libya Today November 26, 2021 13:12 UTC