France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, the co-chairman of the OSCE’s Minsk group on Nagorno-Karabkah, has accepted an invitation from Azerbaijan to visit Baku in the near future.
Neither Paris nor Baku have specified a date for the visit.
The invitation came during a meeting in Paris on May 19 between Ayrault and Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov.
According to Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry, Ayrault and Mammadyarov discussed the results of a Vienna meeting on May 16 between Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s President Serzh Sarkisian.
The two presidents confirmed the importance of maintaining a cease-fire between Azerbaijani troops and separatist ethnic Armenian forces in Azerbaijan’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Aliyev and Sarkisian also said they would work to restore negotiations toward a political settlement over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which in early April saw its worst outbreak of fighting since a 1994 cease-fire deal.
Mammadyarov on May 19 praised France for working to organize another meeting between the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia as soon as possible.