Armenia And Azerbaijan: Russia Mediates -- A Commentary

Financial Times:

A glimmer of light has appeared in one of the most intractable disputes left by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the south Caucasus – not in Georgia, but in neighbouring Armenia and Azerbaijan. At the weekend,Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, persuaded the presidents of both countries to step up efforts to find a political settlement in their confrontation over the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

This may have been something of a public relations exercise by Moscow, anxious to regain the moral high ground as a mediator after its ill-judged and bloody military intervention in Georgia. But any initiative that seeks to break the deadlock between the other two south Caucasus countries, whose conflict over the enclave cost some 25,000 lives and displaced more than 1m refugees, is welcome.

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