In their statement following a trilateral meeting in Sochi, hosted by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan confirmed that they are willing to work further on the resolution, on the mechanism proposed by mediators to investigate border incidents and boost humanitarian cooperation.

The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan held their latest round of Russia-hosted talks on Karabakh on Monday, agreeing on the need to enhance confidence between the parties to the protracted conflict.

The meeting between Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev hosted by their outgoing Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev at the Krasnaya Polyana skiing resort in Sochi was the first in more than half a year.

On Russian president Dmitry Medvedev's invitation his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan will leave for a working visit in Sochi on January 23, where another Russia-mediated trilateral meeting of Azeri and Armenian leaders is to be held to discuss the Karabakh settlement issue.

According to a Regnum news agency report citing an "informed" source, President Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijan President Ilhim Aliyev will have another meeting January 23-24 at the request of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

2011 became a year of practical freezing of political negotiations on the Karabakh settlement and intensified efforts to prevent the use of force and to build confidence measures.

During the year that saw the recognition of South Sudan as an independent state, leaders in Karabakh stated that, in parallel with the negotiations, it will begin diplomatic work for the international recognition of the republic.

World antagonisms are developing in leaps and bounds making it practically impossible to make any prognosis on what scenarios the coming year will bring for one separate issue.

Nonetheless, it is reasonable to assume that no principal progress will be made in the Karabakh conflict settlement.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev may meet early next year for more peace talks around the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the OSCE Minsk Group’s outgoing French Co-Chair Bernard Fassier said at a press conference in Baku on Monday.

The two-day meeting of the OSCE Foreign Ministers’s Council which opened in Vilnius, Lithuania, December 6 has suggested nothing fundamentally new for resolving the Karabakh conflict.

Some experts expected the signing of a document on the withdrawal of snipers from front lines, but nothing to that effect was signed, instead a joint statement merely called for the specification of mechanisms to investigate incidents at the line of contact.

International mediators brokering a solution to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh said they discussed additional measures for enhancing confidence through “people-to-people exchanges” on their latest visit to the conflict region earlier this week.

It is already several months that the information flow on the Karabakh conflict has made little reference to political settlement. After the Russia-hosted summit of the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan in June when the parties in fact failed to agree on principles of settlement, international mediators have been talking more about establishing people-to-people contacts and solving humanitarian problems and even about some regional projects. Perhaps this is what the latest visit to Armenia by the European Union’s Special Representative for South Caucasus Philippe Lefort was aimed at.