U.S. ready to work with Russia on Karabakh settlement, ambassador says
The U.S. ambassador to Armenia, Lynne Tracy, on Tuesday reaffirmed Washington’s stated readiness for renewed cooperation with Russia on facilitating a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
“We have said that we are ready to use the [OSCE] Minsk Group as a platform,” Tracy told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service in an interview. “That offer remains open. We have not seen our Russian colleagues responding to that offer.”
The United States, Russia and France have for decades spearheaded international efforts to end the conflict in their capacity as the Minsk Group’s co-chairs. Moscow says Washington and Paris stopped working with it in that format following its military operation in Ukraine.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karen Donfried denied this during a visit to Yerevan last month. She insisted that the Minsk Group remains a “very important format” for Washington.
The Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed Donfried’s assurances. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed later in June that “the Minsk Group stopped its activities at the initiative of the American and French co-chairs.”
In the words of Tracy, the U.S. still hopes that Russia will “re-engage in this format.”
“We certainly continue to the see the Minsk Group as a forum, a platform that has an international mandate to address the situation of Nagorno-Karabakh,” said the ambassador. “We will continue to look for ways to use that forum. We will also work bilaterally with the parties in the region.”
Related news
- Ned Price: U.S. ready to assist Armenia, Azerbaijan as Minsk Group co-chair
- Artsakh FM hopes OSCE Minsk Group will resume its work