Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev meets Russia's Shoigu, comments on NKH cease-fire

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev on Saturday met with Russian defence officials, where he said he hoped that the ceasefire which ended a six-week war with Armenia will lead to improving relations between the two nations.

Aliyev made the statement during a visit by high-level Russian delegation including the foreign and defence ministers to the Azerbaijani capital Baku.

The delegation also visited the Armenian capital Yerevan.

Russia negotiated the ceasefire signed last week, under which Azerbaijan is to regain sizeable territories that had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since the early 1990s.

The agreement is backed by the presence of nearly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers.

Aliyev said he hoped that the new ceasefire would "further plans to normalize relations with Armenia" and thanked both Russia and Turkey for their intervention in the recent conflict,

The two countries do not have diplomatic relations and the Armenia-Azerbaijan border has been closed since the war over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh that ended in 1994 with Armenian forces in control of the region and large swaths of adjacent territory.

Aliyev went on to say Azerbaijan welcomes the Russian deployment of peacekeepers and called it "an important factor for stabilizing the situation."

"The fact that Russia and Turkey, two friendly nations to us and our two neighbours, will be involved in measures to monitor and control the ceasefire, shows the strengthening of cooperation between our two neighbours", he said.