YEREVAN (Sputnik) – Statements by Turkey on the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh are not helping the situation and sound like calls to war, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday:
"I believe that the statements that were voiced from the mouths of the Turkish leadership are absolutely unacceptable for one simple reason: these were calls not for peace, but for war. These were calls to solving the conflict using military force. This contradicts the positions of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk group’s position at the roots and at the roots of the global community."
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988, when the autonomous region with a predominantly Armenian population sought to secede from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The region proclaimed independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, triggering a war that lasted until a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994.
