Armenian side agrees to meeting of presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan

This was announced by OSCE Minsk Group cochairman from Russia Yuri Merzlyakov in a press briefing at Zvartnots airport on Wednesday, shortly before the cochairmen's departure.

Merzlyakov described as "rich in content and effective" the meetings with Armenian President Robert Kocharian and Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian.

"We still need to get the Azerbaijani side's consent regarding the meeting, in Baku later today, although earlier Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Mammadyarov made a corresponding statement in this regard," the Russian cochairman said.

Commenting on the fact that only two of the three cochairmen of the Minsk Group arrived in Yerevan, Merzlyakov said that they had agreed on the division of work and U.S. cochairman Matthew Bryza "one of these days is due to meet Arkady Ghukasian, who is now on a visit to the United States."

"On the whole, we think that the year is ending on a pretty optimistic note," the Russian cochairman said, adding: "If we manage to keep this mood of the sides, and we hope that we will manage to do that, then we will enter 2007 with quite good prospects."

According to French cochairman Bernard Fassier, "settling such a conflict is like building a wall of peace."

"Every time we try to help the sides to put one or two bricks into that wall, and we keep adding bricks, it is good," the French cochairman stated, emphasizing: "But the wall now is not strong enough yet to make it possible to write an ultimate settlement agreement."

"As Armenian foreign minister said, from October we presented not new, but additional elements, and we hope that those additional elements will give an opportunity to implement that approach," Fassier said.

To the question about Azerbaijan's war rhetoric, Merzlyakov expressed an opinion that in the recent period fewer such statements have been made.

"We always assume that similar "passionate" rhetoric impedes the process, especially when those statements are made on the threshold of some important meeting or at crucial moments," Merzlyakov said. "Anyway, we didn't feel that it would essentially obstruct the basic task to complete 2006 with the third meeting of the presidents."

"In this sense in Washington, Paris and Moscow we have one position that war cannot be a real possibility for settling this conflict," Fassier said. RFE/RL