AzerNews.

James Warlick, the U.S. co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group hopes that the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers’ meeting in Paris will be a step toward a summit in February.

“Hope it will be a step forward leading to a summit in February,” Warlick wrote on Twitter.

The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia will meet in Paris on January 24 to discuss the settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs will also attend the meeting.

The ministers met previously in the framework of the 20th OSCE Ministerial Council meeting held in Kyiv on December 5.

The heads of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair delegations and Azerbaijani and Armenian Foreign Ministers voiced commitment to working together for a peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict emerged in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Since a lengthy war in the early 1990s that displaced over one million Azerbaijanis, Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.

The UN Security Council’s four resolutions on Armenian withdrawal have not been enforced to this day.

Peace talks, mediated by Russia, France and the U.S. through the OSCE Minsk Group, are underway on the basis of a peace outline proposed by the Minsk Group co-chairs and dubbed the Madrid Principles. The negotiations have been largely fruitless so far.