Erdogan announced a proposal to Putin to jointly resolve the crisis in Karabakh

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that in a conversation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, he proposed to jointly solve the problem of the armed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

He said this on Wednesday, October 28, during his speech in parliament. The speech was broadcast by NTV.

“We held talks with Putin, discussed Karabakh in detail. We said: let’s finish this all in the Caucasus. If you want, we will take steps together, we will talk with the parties. But now it is important for us to clearly decide whether we will settle the problem or not,” – the Turkish leader said.

Erdogan added that he told the Russian president that about 2,000 members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party are fighting on the side of Armenia.

The conversation between the two leaders took place a day earlier. During the conversation, Putin informed Erdogan about contacts with the authorities of Azerbaijan and Armenia and the steps being taken to de-escalate the crisis in Karabakh.

Earlier it was reported about telephone conversations with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. During separate conversations, Pompeo called on the leaders of the two countries to abide by their commitments to a ceasefire and to promote a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs.

An agreement on a new humanitarian truce in the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic was reached yesterday during a meeting between Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov with US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Bigan. The new ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh entered into force on October 26 at 8:00 local time (7:00 Moscow time).

On the same day, the representative of the Armenian Defense Ministry Artsrun Hovhannisyan said that heavy fighting had begun in the southeast of Nagorno-Karabakh after the announced ceasefire.

In turn, the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan accused the Armenian side of violating the ceasefire. On the website of the defense department, information appeared about the artillery shelling by the Armenian armed forces of the territories of several regions of Azerbaijan and the positions of the units of the Azerbaijani troops.

The aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh began at the end of September. Baku and Yerevan accused each other of shelling and the death of civilians. The parties twice agreed on a ceasefire for humanitarian purposes, the first agreement entered into force on October 10, and the second on October 18, but in both cases, after the onset of the ceasefire, both Armenia and Azerbaijan continued to accuse each other of violating the agreements and conducting shelling on the line of contact.