Bilateral Meeting in Sochi

On October 31, a bilateral meeting has been held between the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, and the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin in Sochi.

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and stated that this meeting organized on the initiatives of the President of Azerbaijan and the Prime Minister of Armenia is especially significant and necessary to ensure the implementation of all agreements that were reached in 2020 and 2021. Vladimir Putin expressed his gratitude to Ilham Aliyev for highly appreciating Russia’s role in resolving the conflict and noted that the Russian peacekeeping contingent now is fulfilling its mission, and he stressed the need to talk about the situation that has developed, and look for ways to resolve issues that have not yet been resolved. Vladimir Putin touched on an important component of an economic nature and emphasized the creation of a trilateral working group headed by deputy prime ministers and how quite far they have advanced in terms of resolving the issues that were discussed two years ago.

President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev thanked Vladimir Putin for the invitation and for playing an important role in the settlement of the Karabakh conflict and asserted that a Trilateral Declaration signed two years ago put an end to the long-term conflict, the Karabakh conflict had already been consigned to history, and there is practically nothing to discuss in this context and today’s meeting is dedicated to regional affairs. As for the process of normalization of Azerbaijan-Armenia relations, the head of state asserted that this issue requires very serious steps, and in this direction, Azerbaijan put forward 5 basic principles based on the fundamental principles of international law and noted the possibility of achieving normalization on this basis.