A contest for priority access to Azerbaijani gas has developed between three gas transport and trading projects: Nabucco, the Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI), and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP, geographically a continuation of the Turkish pipeline route into Greece, heading for Italy). All three are component projects... MORE

Stakeholders in Nabucco and other Southern Corridor pipeline consortiums, as well as Shah Deniz project stakeholders in Azerbaijan, the European Commission, and many observers consider that investment decisions are a must in the first half of 2011.If finalized at this juncture, the investment decisions would... MORE

The European Commission’s President, Jose Manuel Barroso, and EU Energy Commissioner, Guenther Oettinger, are starting on January 13 an unprecedented joint visit to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. They are responding to Turkmenistan’s recent positive signals about supplies for the EU’s Nabucco transport project, but also to... MORE

Moldova’s Alliance for European Integration (AEI) has won a new, and potentially longer, lease on life, after 16 months of insecure governance (EDM, January 7). Its post-election government is due to be installed on January 14. The AEI’s success, however hard-won, shows the European Union’s... MORE

After almost four years of construction, the Oguz-Gabala-Baku water pipeline was inaugurated on December 28, 2010. Costing almost $1 billion, the pipeline is already termed by many in Azerbaijan as the “second BTC,” referring to the strategically important Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline built a decade ago to... MORE

The prospects for resolving the Karabakh conflict are as uncertain as ever after the inability of Armenia and Azerbaijan’s presidents to reach any tangible agreements on the margins of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Astana on December 1-2. It... MORE

International attention focused on Astana on December 1-2, where the leaders of the 56 member-countries gathered for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit, billed by the Kazakh government as an “epoch-making event.” Kazakhstan ended its chairmanship of the organization in a... MORE

The US Embassy’s February 25, 2010 report from Baku opens an almost panoramic view on the current state of the bilateral relationship (https://cablegate.wikileaks.org). Two aspects stand out in this comprehensive account of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s discussion with the visiting US Under-Secretary of State William... MORE

On November 23, as Georgians marked the seventh anniversary of the Rose Revolution, a peaceful popular protest that opened new opportunities for the South Caucasus nation’s Euro-Atlantic integration, President Mikheil Saakashvili affirmed the country’s European identity as he addressed the European Parliament.(https://www.president.gov.ge/index.php?lang_id=ENG&sec_id=228&info_id=5857)On November 19-20, Saakashvili... MORE

Perhaps more than the WikiLeaks themselves, it is the massive security breach and counterintelligence failure that will, for some time to come, discourage candid conversations between the US government and some of its key partners.Azerbaijan is no exception in this regard. In Azerbaijan’s case, however,... MORE