For Ilham Aliev, this first meeting between the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia is a "good indication" that dialogue can resume and that solutions for peace can be found. He says he is ready to start talks to work on a peace agreement and regrets the lack of response from the Armenian authorities. President Aliev adds that if the Minsk group (France, the United States and Russia) organizes a meeting with the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, he will have no objection to going there.
However, he warns the Armenian authorities that if they attempt to recover the territories lost as a result of last year's conflict, they will face a fierce response from Azerbaijan. For Ilham Aliev, the dispute between the two countries was resolved last year and there will be no turning back. And if he proposed for years to grant the Nagorno-Karabakh region a certain degree of autonomy, he now considers that this option is "no longer on the table" and that the Armenians or the Minsk group must accept this new reality. He claimed, however, that he had no further territorial claims on Armenia.
Finally, the President of Azerbaijan denies the accusations made by human rights defenders who denounce acts of torture on Armenian prisoners of war.
He claims that they have all been released and he strongly denies that his country is behind the aggression in France of Mahammad Mirzali, an exiled blogger critical of the Baku regime.
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