The Russian Orthodox Church will continue its efforts to peacefully settle the Nagorny Karabakh problem, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia said Thursday.

Nagorny Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian region in Azerbaijan, has had de facto independence since a brutal war between the South Caucasus neighbors in the early 1990s, and the two remain bitter foes despite ongoing peace efforts.

"Churches carry their peacekeeping message to where our brothers and sisters suffer, to where there is danger of bloodshed," Kirill told journalists in the residence of the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the city of Etchmiadzin.

"The church should not link its peacekeeping message to any political or pragmatic aims," he said while winding up his three-day visit to Armenia.

A fragile ceasefire has been in place in the region since the war in early 1990s, which claimed more than 30,000 lives on both sides. Karabakh has since remained under Armenian control. Baku has fiercely opposed any decision on Karabakh that could be interpreted as giving the region independence from Azerbaijan.

The Russian patriarch urged the soonest possible resolution of Armenia's problems with Azerbaijan and Turkey, adding that "keeping the fire of hatred is a path to nowhere."

Patriarch Kirill on Wednesday paid tribute to the victims of the Armenian genocide, laying flowers at a memorial in Yerevan.

Turkey has always refused to recognize the killings of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 as an act of genocide. A number of countries have recognized the killings in Armenia as the first genocide of the 20th century.

ETCHMIADZIN, March 18 (RIA Novosti)