BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 12. The Minsk Group was active for 28 years before the second Karabakh war. The co-chair countries have probably made hundreds of visits to Azerbaijan and Armenia over the years. The result is obvious. The result was zero, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said during a meeting dedicated to the results of the first quarter of 2022, Trend reports.
"The OSCE, which gave a mandate to the Minsk Group. The OSCE has also fully accepted the new realities. I recently had a meeting with the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, and the meeting once again showed that the OSCE also fully accepts the new realities, and this is a very significant event. As for the OSCE Minsk Group, immediately after the war, the Minsk Group co-chairs arrived in Baku. This was their first and last visit to Azerbaijan after the war, and there was sufficient information about that meeting in the media, I do not want to repeat that. Our position has always been unequivocal. Whatever we said during the discussions, we voiced the same theses and opinions in our official statements. We have resolved this conflict ourselves. The Minsk Group was active for 28 years before the second Karabakh war. The co-chair countries have probably made hundreds of visits to Azerbaijan and Armenia over the years. The result is obvious. The result was zero. The reasons for that are known to the Azerbaijani public too. I would not like to talk about that too much. The result is obvious, and I want to say again that the result is zero and Azerbaijan has resolved this conflict on its own. We have resolved it by military and political means. Although the mandate given to the Minsk Group to resolve the conflict is de jure in force, it can already be considered invalid de facto. During the post-war period, before the last Russian-Ukrainian war, we expressed our views on this issue. Our foreign minister has met with the Minsk Group co-chairs at various international events, and we said to them, “Tell us what you want to do now? The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has now been resolved, there is no and will not be an administrative territory called Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Tell us what you want to do, let us know, and then we will state our position. For more than a year now, we have not received any proposals on this issue. Under the current circumstances, the Minsk Group and its co-chairs are virtually non-functional. This has already been stated by high-ranking officials of these co-chair countries. Therefore, of course, there can be no talk of any group activity. I think that the OSCE can play a role as a credible international organization. As I mentioned, during my recent meetings with the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office I stated that civil society representatives, the media and other influential public figures could hold meetings within the framework of the OSCE, i.e. within this format, so that Armenian-Azerbaijani relations could be normalized. This is the issue on the agenda now. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been resolved. Now the issue is the normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, and any international organization, an organization that can contribute to this area is certainly welcome to do that," the head of state said.