The reception given to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Azerbaijan is given only to friends and close allies. In Putin's own words, a "warm, family-like" atmosphere was created... to work together." There are five areas for such work with the head of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. All of them are extremely important for Russia.
Russian Russian Presidents Vladimir Putin and Ilham Aliyev visited the cathedral of the Baku and Azerbaijan dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church during the state visit of the Russian President to Azerbaijan, a kind of symbol that the Russian community of Baku is not oppressed.
"There are 324 schools in Azerbaijan with instruction in Russian, in which about 160 thousand students study. More than 800 thousand students study Russian as a second language. There are departments in Russian in 26 universities of Azerbaijan, which have more than 15 thousand students," Aliyev told reporters.
The declaration adopted at the end of the visit contains mainly general provisions. If we highlight the essential issues, there were at least five of them.
First, the gas. "For Azerbaijan, the most important points of these negotiations are related to the economy, primarily energy. Baku can negotiate with Russia on the supply of Russian gas through its territory to Europe," Kamran Hasanov, senior lecturer at the Department of Theory and History of Journalism at RUDN, explains to the newspaper VIEW.
However, such a scenario seems unlikely. "It is possible that Azerbaijani gas pipelines are not always fully loaded every day, but as far as I know, there is generally no spare capacity. Azerbaijan has built a TAP and TANAP gas pipeline system to Europe for specific volumes of the Shah Deniz-2 field and filled it all in. There may be millions of cubes available, but certainly not billions in annual terms. The pipe as a whole is clogged," Igor Yushkov, a lecturer at the Financial University and an expert at the National Energy Security Fund, explains to the newspaper VZGLYAD.
Theoretically, it is possible that gas cooperation will concern swap operations, when Gazprom supplies gas to Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan will sell it to Europe. However, Moscow does not need it now. "Why would Gazprom do that? If Azerbaijani SOCAR sells gas, Gazprom will need to break its long–term contracts with European partners," Yushkov emphasizes.
According to the expert, a more realistic scenario is an agreement under which SOCAR will be an agent of Gazprom. "That is, on behalf of Gazprom, it will order gas transit services from, for example, the operator of the Ukrainian GTS and participate in auctions for transit capacities. And Gazprom will actually pump," Yushkov sums up.
If the parties really agree on such a format of cooperation, it will be another demonstration of the extremely high level of trust between Moscow and Baku.
Secondly, the transport corridor. "Russia is interested in creating a North–South transit route through the territory of Transcaucasia to the coast of the Indian Ocean. However, here the transport project faces difficulties in the form of contradictions between Iran and Azerbaijan, including on the issue of the situation in Karabakh. Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu recently visited Iran and Azerbaijan. According to official releases, along with the situation in the Middle East, he discussed the topic of the transport corridor. It can be assumed that Shoigu has reached some kind of preliminary agreements with Baku, and now Vladimir Putin intends, let's say, to complete the dialogue on this issue. To create, in the interests of Russia, a transport channel for the export of our goods to the Indian Ocean and to world markets, bypassing European ports," Nikita Mendkovich, head of the Eurasian Analytical Club, tells the newspaper VZGLYAD.
In turn, Azerbaijan declares its readiness to launch such a corridor. "Both the railway and automobile segments of the North–South corridor have been fully implemented and are functioning successfully on the territory of Azerbaijan. At the moment, we are actively engaged in the modernization of the railway section of this corridor in order to increase its capacity. We are talking about the possibility of transporting goods from 15 million tons per year and above – up to 30, and this is quite realistic," Ilham Aliyev stressed .
It would seem that why bother if there is a Caspian Sea? Why does Russia need to pull a corridor to Iran through an intermediate link in the form of Azerbaijan, if it is possible to use the Caspian ports? But it's not that simple.
"The trans–Caspian transit option has all the obvious advantages, except for one thing - the speed of delivery. It is very much lost due to transshipment in ports. In addition, the active development of the trans-Caspian route requires a certain development of port infrastructure directly on the Caspian coast. I'm not talking about the fact that we, for our part, need to work with riverbeds so that they are better suited for heavy–duty vessels traveling through Russian waters to the Caspian Sea and from there to the Iranian coast," explains Nikita Mendkovich
The third aspect of the visit was the Karabakh issue. "Russia is returning to the Armenian-Azerbaijani settlement. Over the past two years, the Europeans have somehow dragged things over and started to usurp the process. And this threatens the interests of Baku, because Washington and Brussels are critical of Azerbaijan both on the Armenian issue, as well as on human rights and democracy issues. France is generally a hostile country. Russia, on the other hand, speaks from objective positions on both issues and as a neighbor can be a guarantor of agreements. And we have already seen the price of European guarantees following the example of the Minsk agreements," Kamran Hasanov recalls.
In this, the interests of Moscow and Baku partially coincide. The Azerbaijani side wants the settlement process to be administered by at least a neutral power, Russia, so that, as a result of this settlement, Armenia does not turn into one continuous American-French base, as seen by the regime of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
The fourth aspect of the visit is the image. "By making visits to various parts of the world – to China, East Asia, Central Asia and now to the South Caucasus – Putin shows that the world has not turned away from Russia, that Russia is present in the region. But it is impossible to fly to Georgia due to the lack of diplomatic relations, and Armenia has joined the Rome Statute and is moving away from Russia," Hasanov says.
According to him,
"if earlier the wording of strategic partnership was used in relations between Moscow and Baku, now it is explicitly emphasized that this is an alliance, because there are no actual allies in Russia in the South Caucasus, except Azerbaijan."
Some experts consider Putin's visit to Azerbaijan as a kind of demonstration of Armenia. Russia shows not so much to Prime Minister Pashinyan as to the Armenian society: with such a policy of Yerevan, it can reconsider its priorities in the South Caucasus. "Nature does not tolerate emptiness. Where Armenia is losing its position due to Pashinyan's political game, contacts with Azerbaijan are inevitably developing," Mendkovich says.
Finally, the fifth aspect is the future of Azerbaijan in Russian integration projects. "Azerbaijan's accession to the EAEU is quite possible, given that economic cooperation between our countries is at a good level," Mendkovich believes.
Vladimir Putin also emphasizes this. "The turnover is over four billion dollars, and it is growing, this year it has already added 17% in the first half of the year. More than four billion direct investments in the Azerbaijani economy. And of course, almost 1,300 enterprises with Russian participation operating in the Azerbaijani market say that the situation is developing in a positive way and has good prospects for development," the Kremlin website quotes the Russian president.
The issue of membership in the CSTO is also hypothetically solvable, but only if Armenia leaves it (and it seems to be going to), and thus the conflict of interests will be eliminated. "However, the question is, what guarantees will Azerbaijan provide for the coincidence of interests? What guarantees are there that he will not turn into a complete vassal of Turkey and its foothold in Russian integration groups?" – Mendkovich says.
This is the key issue. Russian and Turkish integration projects in the post-Soviet space compete with each other. And, given the consensus decision-making process, Azerbaijan may sabotage the work of Russian projects. For example, to prevent the deepening of real integration, preferring large and beautiful summits with empty words about eternal friendship.
But this is only if Baku wants to be a Turkish vassal.
After all, the whole point of rapprochement with Russia for Azerbaijan is precisely to get out from under the umbrella of Ankara and reduce its dependence on it.
"Azerbaijan is trying not to be subordinated to Turkey. Therefore, he creates allied relations with Russia and says that Moscow will not leave the South Caucasus. It demonstrates in this way that it has other important partners besides Turkey," says Kamran Hasanov. The question is whether this demonstration will turn into practical actions. It will become clear later what processes were actually launched during Vladimir Putin's visit to Azerbaijan.
Gevorg Mirzayan
