Photo: ITAR-TASS/Alexey Druzhinin

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talks with his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts, Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev, are not going to be smooth, Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.

“Naturally, the talks will be difficult. The key task now is to secure that combat operations are not resumed, not to let the progress reached by the moment of violence outbreak around Nagorno-Karabakh be lost,” he told journalists. “So, the working day promises to be very busy and hard.”

According to Peskov, separate talks with the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents will be followed by a trilateral meeting and a working lunch.