French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement he had spoken on the phone successively with the prime minister of Armenia and the president of Azerbaijan about the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh and had proposed a new method to restart talks within the Minsk group.

Macron said work would start from Friday evening, as he upped his efforts to broker mediation in his role as co-chair of the OSCE Minsk group.

He also reiterated his call for a ceasefire.