MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday welcomed a ceasefire agreement between Azerbaijan and the defeated forces who had been trying to maintain decades of ethnic Armenian control of Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region, the Kremlin said.
In a statement giving an account of a phone call between Putin and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, the Kremlin said Putin “noted with satisfaction that it was possible to overcome the acute phase of the conflict, and welcomed the agreement … on a complete cessation of hostilities and the holding of negotiations on Sept. 21”.
The Kremlin had already said it considered Baku’s lightning offensive an internal action on its own sovereign territory, and dismissed allegations from Armenia, Moscow’s ally, that Russian peacekeepers had done too little to protect Karabakh’s Armenian population.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Grant McCool)
