By Alexander Pracht
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group, set up in the 1990s to mediate the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, should be dissolved, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said yesterday, suggesting that the optimal solution would be a joint proposal from Armenia and Azerbaijan, while emphasizing that U.S. and French co-chairs of the group have ceased communication with the Russian side since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“With Armenia’s recognition of Karabakh as Azerbaijani territory, as well as the September 2023 developments on the ground, the Minsk Group’s mandate has become irrelevant,” Zakharova said during a recent press briefing, referring to Baku’s offensive against the Armenian-populated region last year that forced all of the region’s residents to flee and seek refuge in Armenia.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly raised the issue of dissolving the Minsk Group, recently declaring it as one of Baku’s preconditions for signing a normalization deal with Yerevan, highlighting that the formal dissolution requires Armenia’s consent.
In response, Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party members, including the country’s parliamentary speaker, Alen Simonyan, have argued that the Minsk Group may only be dissolved after the peace treaty is signed. The Foreign Ministry, however, issued a more ambiguous statement in August, speaking of potentially continuing the Minsk process.
The group was created in 1992 in Helsinki as part of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a process originally launched to mediate tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Conference ruled that a summit aiming to encourage a peaceful, negotiated resolution of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh should be held in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, though it never materialized.
For most of its existence, the group has been led by a co-chairmanship of France, Russia, and the United States, though both Armenian and Azerbaijani officials have frequently criticized its lack of effectiveness. The last high-level meeting within the group’s framework took place in October 2017 between then-Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. The group remained notably inactive during the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, and its activities came to a complete halt following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, though it continues to exist formally.
