“The South Caucasus is an important region, which is of great interest to the U.S. and Russia,” said director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace James Collins in his interview with APA’s Moscow correspondent.

He said that the interests of the U.S. and Russia don’t coincide: “But from the political point of view the U.S. and Russia do not have big controversial issue in the South Caucasus. Russia and the U.S. are rivals in the energy sphere of the region. There are few controversial issues in other spheres.”

Asked about insufficient efforts of the U.S. towards the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Collins noted that the solution of the conflict depends only on the will of Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders: “Unfortunately, they fail to reach an agreement in the settlement of the conflict. As a person dealing with this problem, I can say that the solution doesn’t depend on the non-regional countries. Non-region countries can not solve this problem.”