Moscow
Azerbaijan and Armenia opened talks on Friday for a limited cease-fire after almost two weeks of fierce fighting over a disputed province. The goal is to achieve at least a pause long enough to collect bodies from the battlefield and to exchange prisoners.
But the prospects for a broader peace deal appeared dim after the Azeri president, Ilham Aliyev, said in a televised speech Friday that he was happy to have talks but was making no concessions.
“We are winning and will get our territory back and ensure our territorial integrity,” Mr. Aliyev said. “Let them abandon our territory in peace.”
The conflict in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, flared late last month and has threatened to spiral into a wider war drawing in Russia; Turkey, a NATO member; and possibly Iran.
The Russian Foreign Ministry mediated the talks after President Vladimir V. Putin warned earlier this week that Russia could be forced to uphold its mutual defense pact with Armenia if the fighting spread.
“Ours is a tiny country, hardly visible on the map, but it could be the start of gigantic war,” Irina Grigoryan, a teacher of Russian literature who fled Nagorno-Karabakh a week ago, said in a telephone interview on Friday.
After Ms. Grigoryan left with five grandchildren for the safety of Yerevan, the Armenian capital, an apartment where some of the children lived was bombed, she said. She said she is hopeful the cease-fire will hold.
“Can’t they stop the war, at least for a day or two?” she said. “Any negotiation is better than war.”
In nighttime telephone conversations with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia, Mr. Putin suggested the limited truce as a preliminary step. Mr. Putin invited both countries’ foreign ministers to the talks in Moscow.
Mr. Putin “made an appeal to halt combat underway in the area of Nagorno-Karabakh from a humanitarian perspective,” the Kremlin said in a statement. “The goal is to exchange bodies of those who died and prisoners. To consult on these questions with mediation by the Russian Foreign Ministry” both sides were invited to Moscow, the statement said.
The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh has simmered for decades in a remote mountain region of little geostrategic importance, after a war in the early 1990s ended in a cease-fire but no wider settlement. That changed when Turkey, which has been flexing its muscles regionally in recent months, openly backed Azerbaijan, its ethnic Turkic ally, in an escalation that began on Sept. 27.–TASS
