The launch of a Talysh-language radio station based in the Armenian-occupied territories but directed at the members of that ethnic minority elsewhere in Azerbaijan is part of the latest chapter in the long and dangerous history of efforts by Azerbaijan’s three neighbors—Armenia, Iran and the... MORE

On March 17, the Iranian navy launched a new Jamaran-2 destroyer in the Caspian Sea. The Iranian establishment, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi and Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Hassan Firuzabadi, attended the ceremony. This destroyer was developed and... MORE

The gas producers’ consortium at Shah Deniz in Azerbaijan is holding parallel negotiations with the pipeline project companies, Nabucco and Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), to select one of these routes to Europe. March 31 is the deadline for submission of Nabucco-West’s and TAP’s competing offers to... MORE

Among the roles of Gazprom’s South Stream pipeline project was that of aborting the EU-backed Nabucco, merely by threatening to preempt Nabucco’s markets along the same route downstream. Conversely, Nabucco’s European rival Trans-Adriatic Pipeline project (TAP) can abort Nabucco by preempting the gas supply source... MORE

On March 22 in Copenhagen, the Danish and Turkish prime ministers, Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Recep Tayyp Erdogan, witnessed the signing of agreements between subsidiaries of Danish Moeller-Maersk and Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company (SOCAR) to develop a giant port near Izmir in Turkey. The petrochemicals holding... MORE

At the end of February 2013, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili paid an official visit to Baku. During the visit, Saakashvili met with his Azerbaijani counterpart, President Ilham Aliyev, and discussed several issues of mutual interests. As analysts suggested, the visit was supposed to calm down... MORE

The nomination and approval of John Kerry as the next head of the US Department of State did not come as a particular shock for observers inside Azerbaijan. The predictions and rumors prepared both the Azerbaijani establishment and the public for such a scenario. Still,... MORE

On December 21, 2012, Georgian Prime-Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili dropped a bombshell, stating that ongoing construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, connecting Azerbaijan to northeastern Turkey via Georgia, raised many questions about its economic efficiency and profitability for Georgia, regardless of the project’s geopolitical importance (www.geopalitratv.ge,... MORE

China’s economic role in the south Caucasus is expanding rapidly, with Beijing’s investments in Azerbaijan alone now approaching a total of one billion US dollars and its bilateral trade with that country exceeding that figure on an annual basis. But as impressive as those figures... MORE

Several key developments in 2012 had a tremendous impact on Azerbaijan and its foreign policy. First of all, the “reelection” of Vladimir Putin as president of Russian could be considered one of the major events that influenced Azerbaijan. Putin’s triumphal return buried the last hopes... MORE