BRUSSELS, Oct. 17. /TASS/: The foreign ministers of 27 EU countries have agreed to set up a monitoring mission to solve problems on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, the EU Council said in a statement released on Monday.
"The Council today decided to deploy up to 40 EU monitoring experts along the Armenian side of the international border with Azerbaijan with the objective of monitoring, analysing and reporting on the situation in the region," the statement said.
The EU stressed that the decision to set up a monitoring mission to the region followed a meeting between the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, France and the head of the European Council in Prague on October 6 and "is aimed at facilitating the restoration of peace and security in the area, the building of confidence and the delimitation of the international border between the two states."
The EU Council explained that for the rapid deployment of the mission, "it was decided that the monitoring experts will be temporarily deployed from the European Union Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM Georgia)". "The monitoring mission will have a temporary nature and in principle will not last more than two months," the statement emphasized.
On October 6, the European Council announced that a meeting in Prague between its President Charles Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron, his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan resulted in a decision to set un a EU monitoring mission that would begin in October and last for two months. Before that meeting, Aliyev and Pashinyan had last held talks on August 31 in Brussels, with Michel in attendance. Two weeks after that meeting, widespread hostilities broke out on the border between the two countries.
