International News

YEREVAN, (APP/AFP): The US and Russia will push the leaders
of Azerbaijan and Armenia to shore up a fragile truce when the arch-foes meet on Monday for the first time since a surge in violence over the breakaway Nagorny Karabakh region.
Four days of fighting in Nagorny Karabakh in early April killed at
least 110 people as a festering conflict over the territory flared into the worst violence since a 1994 ceasefire that halted a brutal war.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John
Kerry are to hold talks Monday in Vienna with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sarkisian, in a bid to defuse tensions between the two former Soviet neighbours.
A truce hammered out by Moscow halted the latest bloodshed but the
situation remains on a knife-edge, with both sides accusing the other of
violating the agreement.
“For now, the main aim for the mediators is to just calm down the
tensions along the frontline,” Armenia-based political analyst Hrant Melik-Shahnazaryan told AFP.
“The signing of any documents or reaching of any other sort of
agreements is highly unlikely.”