Russia confirms contacts with EU, US representatives over Karabakh last month

MOSCOW

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that a Russian diplomat had a meeting with EU and US representatives on the Karabakh conflict in the Turkish city of Istanbul in September.

Commenting on media reports about "secret" Russia-EU-US talks, Peskov said at a news conference in Moscow that contacts did take place, but not everything happened as the media described.

"There were certain contacts on Karabakh, they took place. But these are not the negotiations that are written there (Western media)," he said.

Separately, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also confirmed such contacts, saying delegates from Brussels, Moscow, and Washington engaged in an "ordinary exchange of views on Karabakh at the meeting."

"However, we will look at how the West presents everything, and from there, the goals that originally stood before them will be clear. If the story of this meeting is now being played out in the Western media as a kind of provocative, it means that the goal of the US and the EU was to create another provocation," she said.