Russia and Turkey intend on accelerating a normalisation of ties between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the foreign ministers of the two countries have vowed.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters after a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu in Antalya, Turkey, that the two major powers had a common position.

“We agreed to closely coordinate our efforts for assisting Baku and Yerevan to solve the practical issues related with the normalisation of relations, focusing on the strengthening of confidence measures,” Lavrov said, according to the TASS news agency.

Russia and Turkey have highly complex relations. Ankara is a NATO member and over 25 years helped build Azerbaijan’s army from scratch. Russia, of course, is an ardent NATO foe.

Officially, Armenia is a member of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Still, Yerevan is largely seen as, at most,  a reluctant member of the bloc, which also includes Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.

Though Baku reversed three decades of losses last year by retaking districts occupied by Armenian forces, the border issue between the two and the question of re-opening transport links remains unresolved. Periodic incidents have persisted between the two sides.

Azerbaijan wants the demarcation issue solved as soon as possible. But doing so may involve the fate of the remaining parts of the former Azerbaijan Soviet autonomous district of Nagorno-Karabakh still under Armenian effective control.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, blamed by hardline forces for last year’s military losses, nonetheless overwhelmingly won a snap parliamentary election last month.

Analysts say this indicated deep fatigue with the war with Azerbaijan, which has isolated the country, constricted its economy and forced a mass of emigration.

But as always, any concession to Azerbaijan, which many people in the country automatically associate with Turkey and the events of 1915, is risky.