CSTO's Bordyuzha says peace only way to solve Karabakh knot

/By AzerNews/

By Mushvig Mehdiyev

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict could be settled only by peaceful political way, said Nikolai Bordyuzha, Head of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

"Peaceful resolution of the conflicts doesn't have any alternative in the modern world. This is also applicable on the conflicts not only in Ukraine, but also in Nagorno-Karabakh," Bordyuzha said.

He added that the problems in Ukraine need a peaceful agreement, saying: "I opt for a peaceful resolution to all of these conflicts."

Bordyuzha said Ukraine was repeatedly offered to join the CSTO. "The organization is still ready to cooperate with Kiev,” he said. “In particular, the country was invited to cooperate in the fields of information security and combating the drug trafficking."

He noted that if Ukraine decides to join the CSTO, there will be appropriate ground for cooperation.

Member states of the CSTO called for a peaceful settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in a joint statement issued during their most recent gathering in Moscow on December 23.

The alliance underlined the importance of completion of works on the basic principles of the conflict's resolution.

According to the experts, including Alexander Golts, Alexei Malashenko, Sergei Markov, Pavel Felgenhauer, the CSTO could not intervene in the negotiations over Nagorno-Karabakh problem, since it doesn't have any right to be engaged in any process related to the conflict.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict emerged in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Since a lengthy war in the early 1990s that displaced over one million Azerbaijanis, Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.

Peace talks, mediated by Russia, France and the U.S. through the OSCE Minsk Group, are underway on the basis of a peace outline proposed by the Minsk Group co-chairs and dubbed the Madrid Principles. However, the negotiations have been largely fruitless so far despite the efforts of the co-chair countries for over 20 years.

Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council's four resolutions on its pullout from the neighboring country's territories.