On April 17, Hikmet Hajiyev, the Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan and the head of the Foreign Policy Affairs Department of the Presidential Administration, confirmed the decision to withdraw Russian peacekeepers from Azerbaijan's territory.

"According to the tripartite statement signed on November 10, 2020, a decision was made by the top leadership of both countries to prematurely withdraw the peacekeepers of the Russian Federation temporarily stationed in the territory of Azerbaijan from the territory of our country. The process has already begun, the ministries of defense of Azerbaijan and Russia are implementing the decision," Hajiyev stated.

The Kremlin also confirmed the commencement of the withdrawal of Russian peacekeeping forces from Karabakh. Dmitry Peskov, the Russian President's press secretary, affirmed the information, stating, "Yes, this is true."

Grigory Karasin, Chair of the Russian Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs, remarked that the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers from Nagorno-Karabakh follows logically from Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan’s acknowledgment of this territory as part of Azerbaijan.

“I believe that it is a completely logical consequence of Nagorno-Karabakh being recognized as part of Azerbaijan by the leader of Armenia. The fact is that after the resolution of the Karabakh issue through the mouth of Nikol Pashinyan, who said that it is the territory of Azerbaijan, the issue of the presence of our peacekeepers [in Nagorno-Karabakh] was resolved in direct contact with the leadership of Azerbaijan. And it was decided to gradually take them out of there,” Karasin told Interfax. 

Russian peacekeepers were deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh based on a trilateral agreement among Moscow, Baku, and Yerevan, which concluded a six-week conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the region in November 2020.