U.S. President Donald Trump stressed the importance of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict when he congratulated Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on winning Armenia’s recent parliamentary elections.

“Congratulations on your appointment as Prime Minister of Armenia and your coalition’s success in the December 9, 2018 parliamentary elections,” Trump said in a letter made public by Pashinian’s press office at the weekend.

“The United States supports a prosperous, democratic Armenia at peace with its neighbors,” he wrote. “Together, we can make progress on deepening trade between our countries, strengthening global security, and combating corruption.”

“A peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will help these efforts,” added Trump.

Visiting Yerevan in October, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said Washington expects Pashinian to take “decisive steps” towards a Karabakh settlement after his widely anticipated victory in the snap elections. Pashinian should have a “very strong mandate” to reach a compromise peace deal with Azerbaijan, Bolton said after talks with the Armenian leader.

Pashinian’s My Step bloc won as much as 70 percent of the vote in the elections. The U.S. Embassy in Armenia was quick to praise the conduct of the vote, echoing its positive assessment by European observers.

The U.S. has long been spearheading, together with Russia and France, international efforts to end the Karabakh conflict. Diplomats from the three world powers co-heading the OSCE Minsk Group have organized and attended four meetings of the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers in the last six months.

The mediators seemed encouraged by the most recent of those meetings which took place in Paris on January 16. In a joint statement, they said Foreign Ministers Zohrab Mnatsakanian and Elmar Mammadyarov “agreed upon the necessity of taking concrete measures to prepare the populations for peace.”

The Minsk Group co-chairs also said that they will visit the region soon to meet with Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

Aliyev and Pashinian spoke to each other for the first time on the sidelines of a summit of former Soviet republics held in Tajikistan in September. There has been a significant decrease in ceasefire violations around Karabakh and along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border since then.

The two leaders talked again during another ex-Soviet summit that took place in Russia in early December. Aliyev said afterwards that the year 2019 will see a “new impetus” to the Karabakh peace process.

https://www.azatutyun.am/a/29721753.html