Azerbaijan issues protest to Ukraine
BAKU – The Azerbaijani embassy in Ukraine has issued a protest to the country’s foreign ministry over the publication of biased articles about the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh in a Ukrainian magazine, Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Elkhan Polukhov has said.
The Image business magazine has released a special edition with the aid of the Armenian embassy in Ukraine that was devoted to Armenia and the self-proclaimed republic run by ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno Karabakh region. The edition contained anti-Azerbaijani stories and false data.
In its protest note, Baku said the magazine articles are libelous and distort Azerbaijan’s history and territorial integrity, and publication of such stories is unacceptable.
Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a war over Nagorno Karabakh that emerged before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and ended with the signing of a fragile ceasefire in 1994. 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory has been under Armenian occupation since the war. OSCE mediators from Russia, the United States and France have led negotiations on Karabakh settlement but little progress has been made so far.