MOSCOW, 28 November 2021, (TON): Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted the leaders of regional rivals Armenia and Azerbaijan for talks marking the first anniversary of a Moscow-brokered peace deal that ended fighting in the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In the southern city of Sochi, Putin held a bilateral meeting with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. Then the Russian president met with Aliyev and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan together, and after that he said he would have a separate bilateral meeting with Pashinyan.

Opening the meetings, Putin said “a lot has been done over the past year, but not all the issues are yet resolved. He pointed to repeated clashes on the border between the two nations that resulted in multiple casualties.”

The goal, a year into the truce, is to create conditions for the revival of the region, so that people can feel safe there and be able to carry out normal economic activities, develop the economy, Putin stressed.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decades-old dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that lies within Azerbaijan but was under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.

The Azerbaijani military routed the Armenian forces in 44 days of fierce fighting in the fall of 2020, which ended with a Russia-brokered peace deal that saw Azerbaijan gain control of a significant part of Nagorno-Karabakh and reclaim all the regions controlled by Armenian forces outside the separatist region.

Russia has deployed nearly 2,000 peacekeepers for at least five years to monitor the peace deal.