In talks in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian expressed readiness to seek a peaceful solution to the conflict over Azerbaijan’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted the June 20 meeting -- the second between Aliyev and Sarkisian since a truce was established in early April to halt four days of fighting around Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan’s military and Armenia-backed separatists.
In a joint statement issued by the Kremlin after the talks, the sides expressed satisfaction that the cease-fire was holding and agreed to increase the number of international observers in the conflict zone.
Aliyev and Sarkisian last met in Vienna in May.
Armenian-backed separatists seized the mainly Armenian-populated region from Azerbaijan during a war in the early 1990s that killed some 30,000 people.
Despite shaky cease-fire deals, diplomatic efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute have brought little progress.
