Russia – Azerbaijan: Summit Focuses on Peace with Armenia, Russian Gas Exports, Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Baku, the capital of neighboring Azerbaijan, for a summit meeting with President Ilham Aliyev of the former Soviet republic in the Caucasus. The talks, which will take place on Monday, August 19, will focus on the most pressing “regional” issues – from the normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia, to the Middle East and prospects for a political solution to the conflict, to armed relations between Russia and Ukraine after the invasion of the Russian Kursk region by Kiev’s armed forces.

Putin and Aliyev will discuss the peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which the two countries have been working on for some time. “The presidents will exchange views on topical issues of regional and international politics, in particular on the topic of the peace agreement between Baku and Yerevan,” the Kremlin spokesman said, according to whom “the Russian side is ready to continue providing all possible and necessary assistance for normalizing relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia.”

The second part of the Putin-Aliyev summit will be devoted to the development of trade and economic partnership between the two countries, with a special focus on the possibility of increasing Russian gas exports through Azerbaijan’s international gas pipeline system, known as the Southern Corridor.

According to a press release issued by the Kremlin, “the Russian-Azerbaijani strategic partnership is dynamically developing on the basis of the principles of friendship, good-neighborliness, and mutual respect, as well as on the basis of the Declaration of Cooperation signed by the presidents in February 2022 in Moscow.” In 2023, trade turnover between Russia and Azerbaijan amounted to 4.1 billion dollars, and in the first half of this year it increased by 7.1% to 2 billion dollars. Russia’s direct investments in Azerbaijan reached 4.2 billion dollars. Currently, more than 1200 companies with Russian capital are successfully operating in Azerbaijan. Moscow believes that economic cooperation between Russia and Azerbaijan will take a qualitative leap after the commissioning of the intercontinental railroad starting from St. Petersburg, which will connect the European part of Russia and the Caucasus with Iran and its ports in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

A separate topic will be the recent escalation of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine following Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk and Belgorod regions. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Ukraine is planning an attack on the nuclear power plant in Kursk Region. “The Russian Defense Ministry assesses with due seriousness the information received through independent channels about the Kiev regime’s preparations for an attack on the Kursk nuclear power plant,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a press release.