Azerbaijan, Armenia Hold Talks On Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia's President Robert Kocharian and Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev held two-way talks before joining Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan over which the two neighboring states fought a five-year war in the early 1990s.

The talks were held on the sidelines of a meeting of leaders of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member countries in the Kazakh capital Astana.

The OSCE Minsk Group, which is co-chaired by Russia, France, and the United States, has been mediating between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the past decade.

Some 35,000 people were killed and about 1 million displaced by the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which erupted during the breakup of the Soviet Union.

(AFP/ITAR-TASS)