Armenia – (warsoor) – Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed to a ceasefire from midnight on October 10, and plan to start “substantive” talks over Nagorno-Karabakh, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Saturday, after nearly two weeks of fierce fighting in the disputed territory.
The breakthrough came after some 10 hours of talks in Moscow, in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Russia’s top diplomat said the Red Cross would act as an intermediary in the humanitarian operation.
Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Moscow, Alexsandra Stojanovich-Godfroid, said the agreement was for a “humanitarian ceasefire”.
We have to “wait to see whether this ceasefire will really happen as agreed, if it will come down to the exchange of prisoners, and if the parties are really willing to return to the negotiating table to solve this decades long conflict,” she said.
At least 300 people have been reported killed in the fighting, which broke out on September 27 and is the most serious in the territory since clashes in 2016 left dozens dead.
Lavrov did not provide details on the talks but said the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group would mediate.
Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and his Azeri counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov did not speak to reporters.
Source: Aljazeera