Vestnik Kavkaza – “I am sure the countries that Russia, Iran and Turkey will never allow Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to transform into regional,” President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said in an interview with Al Jazeera.
“We are strongly against this conflict to transform into a regional. That’s what Armenia wants to do. Therefore they invent fake news about some external support of Azerbaijan. But at the same time they are asking for external support for themselves. That’s why I have a feeling that their main target now when they suffer a very serious defeat on the battlefield they want to make this conflict regional. But I am sure the countries that you’ve mentioned they will never allow it to happen,” he said.
“Because security in our region is in the interests of all the regional countries. Among those countries you’ve mentioned it’s Turkey, Russia, Iran, they are regional countries. Other countries has nothing to do here in the region, they are not regional countries. We are not responsible, me personally for the composition of the Minsk Group. Of course if we decided today of the composition of any contact group which could facilitate peace of course composition would be completely different,” he noted.
Answering the question about appeals of the international community to return to ceasefire, he said: “Ceasefire cannot be achieved unilaterally. I’m just trying to deliver this message to those leaders who called me during these days, saying that it was not Azerbaijan who started. We have to defend ourselves. If we did not respond this time the way we did, today we would have had hundreds of victims among civilians. They want to kill as many Azerbaijanis as they can. Ceasefire? OK. But on what conditions? Conditions must be that they withdraw from our territories. We need our territories back by peaceful means. And we demonstrated for 28 years our willingness to have peaceful settlementsettlement,” he stresses.
