Armenia’s ex-FM, MP of the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) Vartan Oskanian left a message on his Facebook page, addressing the current trends in the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process.

A statement by Catherine Ashton, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, is actually the reason for Mr Oskanian’s message.

Mrs Catherine Ashton pointed out the vital importance of progress in the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process for full realization of Armenia’s potential for political and economic integration with the European Union (EU). She called on Armenia and Azerbaijan to step up their efforts to achieve an agreement.

Mrs Ashton’s statement followed that by the presidents of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairing nations at the G20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico. The diplomatic wording of that statement was, as Armenia’s first president noted in his latest speech, rather strong and essentially different from the ones made in L'Aquila (2009), Muskoka (2010) and Deauville (2011).

The Nagorno-Karabakh peace process is obviously locked in stalemate now. The causes of the stalemate are as follows:

First, no document for all the conflicting parties to accept as a basis for negotiations is available, which is a serious problem. The dispute is actually over three different and revised documents: the Sochi document, which is utterly unacceptable to Armenia; the Saint Petersburg document, which is utterly unacceptable to Azerbaijan and the Kazan document, which is unacceptable to Azerbaijan as well. This is a sticking point in the negotiations.

The second cause of the stalemate is the growing number of unsettled issues over the years. The Azerbaijan-proposed ten amendments have been on the agenda since the Kazan meeting, which are unacceptable to the Armenia side.

The mediators’ task is now to persuade the conflicting parties to accept one of the aforementioned documents as a basis for negotiations (US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must have made such an attempt during her visit). Moreover, it is logical to suppose that Mrs Clinton proposed that official Baku withdraw eight or nine of its proposals and Yerevan, in turn, accept one or two of them.

Oskanian’s deep conviction is that Mrs Clinton did not leave Armenia “empty-handed,” because Armenia was unable to add anything new to the document approved in Kazan.

Mr Oskanian believes the Armenian side’s weak point in the negotiation process was that, both untimely and to excess, it agreed to concessions without being sure that Azerbaijan would make its concessions. The same mistake was made in the Armenian-Turkish negotiations.

The current situation is actually the reason for the mediators to reserve the right to equally accuse the conflicting parties, whereas it is Azerbaijan, with its excessive demands and militant rhetoric and provocations, that is both damaging the talks and threatening the fragile peace, says Oskanian’s message.