BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 13. To clinch peace in the Caucasus, one must pay attention to both sides, Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan - Head of the Foreign Policy Department of the Presidential Administration Hikmet Hajiyev wrote on his page on X (Twitter), Trend reports.
"This region of Azerbaijan - Karabakh - was occupied by neighboring Armenia for 30 years. And after a brutal war in the early 1990s, which saw close to 1 million Azerbaijanis ethnically cleansed from their land, occupying Armenian forces mined thousands of square miles of this territory, save for a small holdout at its center. There, the remaining community of ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan were connected to Armenia via a single land route - the Lachin road.
This gray zone of lawlessness and land mines existed illegally - and unchallenged - until three years ago, when Azerbaijan took much of the territory of Karabakh in a 44-day conflict", Hajiyev added.