Azerbaijan, Armenia leaders to meet for talks over Karabakh

The Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents are set to meet in the Austrian capital Vienna to discuss a fragile ceasefire in the disputed Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, as well as diplomats from Russia, the US and France, will meet in Vienna late Monday to discuss the situation in the volatile Nagorno-Karabakh.

The meeting between Sarkisian and Aliyev will be their first face-to-face encounter since Nagorno-Karabakh in early April saw its worst violence in two decades.

The European Union's foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini has said that she would meet with the both leaders. Mogherini, who announced the meeting on social media, did not say if she would meet with them together or separately.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry are also expected to meet with the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents in a bid to defuse tensions between the two neighbors.

Analysts and experts say the two sides are unlikely to make any major progress or reach an agreement at Monday's encounter.

"For now, the main aim for the mediators is to just calm down the tensions along the frontline," AFP quoted Armenia-based political analyst Hrant Melik-Shahnazaryan as saying, adding, "The signing of any documents or reaching of any other sort of agreements is highly unlikely."

Thomas de Waal of the Carnegie Europe think tank wrote in an op-ed for the Politico news site that : "The two presidents want very different things. The Azerbaijani side wants new negotiations and to use its military force as leverage."

 “The Armenian side is digging in harder -- they are reluctant to agree to anything that might look like submission to Azerbaijani military pressure and have demanded 'security guarantees,” de Waal noted.

According to Elkhan Shainoglu of the Atlas think tank in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, fierce fighting between the two sides could erupt again if negotiations fail to yield results.

In early April, Azerbaijani and Armenian troops used artillery, tanks, and other armaments against each other on a scale not seen since a separatist war concluded in 1994. According to reports, nearly 75 servicemen from both sides along with a number of civilians were killed in the latest skirmishes between the hostile neighbors.

A Russian-mediated truce went into effect later that month, but sporadic clashes have since continued.

The Karabakh region, which is located in the Azerbaijan Republic but is populated by Armenians, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian militia and the Armenian troops since a three-year war which claimed over 30,000 lives and ended in 1994.

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