“Russian President Vladimir Putin has called on the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan to end hostilities in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a confrontation that has dragged on for "decades" and which, he says, everyone agrees must end.

The Russian president held a two-hour meeting on Monday with the Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinian, in which he conveyed this need, to which the Armenian leader stressed the importance of the withdrawal of Azeri troops from the area of tensions.

Pashinian acknowledged to Putin that this would be an important step for Yerevan and that he expects Moscow to have a clear position on the matter. He also assured that Armenia is in a position to restore dialogue with Azerbaijan at any time, according to the Russian TASS news agency.

After the face-to-face meeting between Putin and Pashinian, the Russian leader is now preparing to do the same with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Later, the three leaders will hold a three-way meeting in which the main topic of discussion will be how to defuse tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh.

"I know they have the political will for this and we support it in every possible way. We should work with them now and then in a trilateral format to find key points that will allow us to move forward," President Putin said.

The governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed in mid-September to a ceasefire after the latest clashes on the border, which resulted in more than 200 soldiers killed between the two sides.

Armenia and Azerbaijan had a confrontation in 2020 to take control of Nagorno Karabakh, a territory with a majority Armenian population that has been the focus of conflict since it decided to separate in 1988 from the region of Azerbaijan integrated into the Soviet Union.

Hostilities between the two nations lasted six weeks and left thousands dead. They finally ceased when the two countries reached a Russian-brokered cease-fire agreement allowing Russian peacekeepers to settle in Nagorno-Karabakh for a period of five years.”