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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday he hopes an upcoming contact between the Azerbaijani and Armenian tops diplomats on the sidelines of an OSCE ministerial meeting will help consolidate efforts to build up measures of trust in the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement, TASS news agency reported.

"We are interested in the implementation of the agreement on the measures of trust and media contacts that were reached at the Vienna summit and later at a ministerial meeting in Moscow. They are being gradually implemented and I hope a meeting of the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers due later this week will help consolidate these processes," he said at a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

The Russian top diplomat said he shared the Azerbaijani president’s point of view that the sides must refrain from "rhetoric that runs counter to the basic principles undertaken by both sides and committed to paper in the United Nations Charter and the Helsinki Final Act."

"I agree with you that much is yet to be done in terms of lasting political settlement," Lavrov noted.