Hoagland: OSCE MG to visit South Caucasus in summer

By Azernews

By Rashid Shirinov

The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs will visit the South Caucasus region in June or early July, said Richard Hoagland, the U.S. co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group.

He made the remarks on May 12 in Washington at the conference entitled “The International Politics of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict.”

The United States, along with Russia and France, is a co-chair country of the Minsk Group established to broker a peace to the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Last time the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group visited the region in March 2017 to get acquainted with the real situation on the ground. The co-chairs met with the presidents and foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia and also visited territories around Nagorno-Karabakh.

While the OSCE Minsk Group acted as the only mediator in resolution of the conflict for over two decades, the occupation of the territory of the sovereign state with its internationally recognized boundaries has been left out of due attention of the international community for years.

Azerbaijan and Armenia for over two decades have been locked in conflict, which emerged over Armenian territorial claims to Azerbaijan. Since the 1990s war, Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.

The UN Security Council has adopted four resolutions on Armenian withdrawal from the occupied lands of Azerbaijan, but they have not been enforced to this day.