The meeting began less than a week after the leaders of the three states held talks in another Russian city, Sochi. They reported further progress towards opening the Armenian-Azerbaijani border to passenger and cargo traffic.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said a trilateral working group dealing with the matter will meet in Moscow in the coming days to announce “decisions which we agreed today.” He did not elaborate.
The session of the group co-headed by deputy prime ministers of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan began in the afternoon and was still not over late in the evening.
“I cannot give at this point details of the agenda of the trilateral working group,” a spokeswoman for Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigorian said earlier in the day.
The Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped last year’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh commits Armenia to opening rail and road links between Azerbaijan and its Nakhichevan exclave. Armenia should be able, for its part, to use Azerbaijani territory as a transit route for cargo shipments to Russia and Iran.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly claimed that the deal calls for a special “corridor” that will connect Nakhichevan to the rest of Azerbaijan via Armenia’s Syunik province. Commenting on the Sochi talks over the weekend, he declared that the “Zangezur corridor is becoming reality.”
The Armenian Foreign Ministry effectively denied that on Tuesday. Grigorian likewise insisted that the three leaders discussed conventional cross-border transport links, rather than “exterritorial roads” implied by Aliyev.