Yerevan /Mediamax/. Azerbaijan has expressed a positive stance on the offer of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs to expand the monitoring mission in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone.

TASS reports that the head of the Azerbaijani MFA press service Hikmet Gajiev has made that statement at the press conference in Baku today. He has also added that “the process must go parallel with substantive, intensive negotiations on settlement of the Karabakh conflict”.

Hikmet Gajiev has noted that the issue of expansion of the monitoring mission, which occasionally monitors compliance with the ceasefire regime in the Karabakh conflict zone, has been discussed throughout the year.

On December 25, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Grigory Karasin said in the interview to Interfax that the parties to the conflict received concrete offers concerning the expansion of the OSCE monitoring mission. According to him, the heads of Foreign Ministries of Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed to continue the talks on this and other issues at the meeting scheduled for the second half of January 2018, which would be attended by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs.

Currently, the OSCE observing mission is comprised of six people.

Mediamax finds it worth noticing that the agreements on expansion of the mission had been reached by Armenian and Azerbaijani Presidents at the summits in Vienna and St. Petersburg, which took place in 2016 after the April War. However, the official Baku has avoided making any statements on that issue in the past year and a half.