According to the deputy, Moscow hoped for gradual progress in areas such as the unblocking of economic and transport ties in the region, the delimitation of the border and the solution of humanitarian problems, Sputnik news agency reported Saturday.

Galuznoi also said he was confident that all the tripartite agreements at the highest level, which ‘formed a road map for the comprehensive normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia’, would be implemented and would contribute to progress towards a peace treaty.

In mid-September last year, violent armed clashes broke out along several sections of the Armenian-Azeri border, resulting in more than 200 deaths and hundreds of injuries on both sides.

The hostilities, the largest in nearly two years, occurred outside Nagorno-Karabakh, a region with a majority Armenian population over which Yerevan and Baku have fought several wars since its secession in 1988 from the then Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.

Armenia requested support from Russia, to which it is bound by a treaty of friendship, cooperation and mutual aid, as well as from the Collective Security Treaty Organization, an alliance founded in 2002 that also includes Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Firing on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border ceased on September 14, thanks to Russian mediation, but in the days that followed Yerevan and Baku repeatedly accused each other of violating the armistice.

In late October the leaders of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Armenia’s Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev reaffirmed their commitment to agreements to normalize bilateral relations, signed in November 2020.

mh/ro/gfa