During a press briefing today, U.S. Department of State Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel said the U.S. has not seen any effort by Russia to facilitate the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict settlement process.

Here’s the transcript of the exchange.

Q: Thanks so much. And on – last, on conflicts. Putin also – actually, there have been some conflicting statements coming out of Russia lately, but Putin was talk about some sort of goodwill in terms of – in response to the territorial conflicts, although he forgot to mention Ukraine in his statement. My question is about Armenia-Azerbaijan. There is no – there is lack of reluctance when it comes to Russian officials criticizing the West and its mediation efforts on Nagorno-Karabakh issue, and Zakharova said two days ago that the West is trying to replace us or trying to steal our mediating efforts. There also are offices on counter-mission from CSTO vis-à-vis the EU mission.

Two questions. One is, do you have any concern on your end that Russia might jeopardize once again the process that you guys have been putting together? And secondly, where is Ambassador Reeker during these days?

Patel: So, a couple of things. First, on the second part of your question, I don’t have any updates for Ambassador Reeker’s travel beyond – I think we discussed some of this last week, but we’ll check if we have an update. And look, if any country is eager to engage with us on Armenia and Azerbaijan and help us get to a peaceful resolution, we certainly would welcome that. But we have not seen any kind of effort from Russia as you might be referring to.

And I know this wasn’t the crux of your question, but to your – to your comment about goodwill, let’s talk about goodwill for a second. And showing goodwill would be stopping the assault on the people of Ukraine. It would be stopping the bombs. It would be stopping the shelling of hospitals and stopping the kidnapping of children. These things are not goodwill.

(Philip Reeker, recently appointed the U.S. Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, travelled to Armenia in September to discuss U.S. support for diplomatic efforts between Armenia and Azerbaijan towards a lasting peace and efforts to normalize Armenia-Turkey relations.)