France welcomes declaration on POWs swap between Armenia and Azerbaijan

France has welcomed the joint statement over the Nagorno Karabakh conflict made by Armenian, Azerbaijani and Russian presidents at a recent meeting in the Russian city of Astrakhan, according to a statement issued by the French Foreign Ministry.

Together with US and Russia France co-chairs the OSCE Minsk Group currently spearheads the peace talks over the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

Paris has also welcomed Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's "personal efforts" in the settlement of the Karabakh conflict.

"The measures coordinated between the parties in Astrakhan can help ease tension and reduce the incidents of the ceasefire violation that have become of frequent occurrence in the recent months. For that reason France expects that those measures will be implemented without any delay," read the statement.

In a next round of peace talks on October 27 held in the Russian southern city of Astrakhan Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev reaffirmed the provisions of the declaration adopted on November 2, 2008 in Meiendorf, Russia.
They also underscored that additional steps are necessary to take to strengthen the ceasefire regime and mutual trust in the military sphere in an attempt to solve the conflict peacefully.

They two presidents also signed a declaration to exchange prisoners of war and return the corpses of soldiers and civilians killed on the line of contact.

The conflict between the two former Soviet countries over Nagorno Karabakh started when Karabakhi Armenians voiced their intention to live independently from Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. It was followed by pogroms against Armenians in Sumgait, Baku and Nagorno Karabakh that turned into a bloody war, leaving around 30,000 killed and more than a million displaced.