South Caucasus - The Times Of Central Asia

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Azerbaijan

Aliyev Sees Azerbaijan and Central Asia’s Interests Converging

The Shusha Global Media Forum, an annual gathering held in Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region and conceived as a platform for journalists and media representatives from dozens of countries across Europe and beyond, including the United States, acquired broader regional significance last year because of its consequences for several Russian participants. Last year’s forum attracted widespread attention in Russia after two prominent Russian participants faced repercussions at home. Mikhail Gusman, then first deputy director general of the state news agency TASS, was dismissed shortly after attending the event and praising Azerbaijan, although no official reason was given. The following month, pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov was designated a “foreign agent” after facing criticism for his favorable comments about Azerbaijan. It was therefore unsurprising that this year’s forum attracted close attention from media outlets around the world. Beyond the forum’s Russia-related significance, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev’s remarks pointed to a broader regional shift. Azerbaijan increasingly sees its political and economic interests converging with those of Central Asia, particularly through the Middle Corridor, cross-Caspian energy links, and infrastructure cooperation. According to official figures, approximately 160 journalists, experts, and public officials from 53 countries attended the event. The forum brought together representatives of around 30 international news agencies, more than 60 leading media organizations, and roughly 10 international organizations and companies. Former TASS executive Mikhail Gusman attended the fourth Shusha Global Media Forum and highlighted its growing international profile. “There are very few, if any, media platforms in the world that bring together representatives of media organizations from every region to exchange views and engage in dialogue. That is precisely why the importance of this forum cannot be overstated,” he said. As in previous years, President Aliyev opened the forum and spent nearly three hours answering questions from journalists representing a wide range of countries. Given the latest deterioration in relations between Baku and Moscow, many observers were watching to see whether questions would prompt unusually sharp comments about Russia. The organizers did not shy away from potentially sensitive questions. Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon, who has been designated an extremist in Russia, was once again invited to the forum and made full use of the opportunity. Gordon noted Ukrainian drone and missile strikes deep inside Russia before asking Aliyev what counsel he would offer Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin. “What advice would you give Putin today, when, in my view, he no longer has any good options left?” Gordon asked. Aliyev avoided an overtly confrontational response, stating that Ukraine should “never agree to occupation” and that the war “must be stopped—and stopped immediately.” Aliyev’s exchange with journalists and analysts from Europe and the United States painted a clear picture of Azerbaijan’s worldview and the role it sees for itself internationally. That perspective remains heavily shaped by the three-decade conflict between Baku and Yerevan over Karabakh. According to Aliyev, the United States, France, and Russia all sought to preserve the status quo during that period. He described those decades as a “time of war,” arguing that...

South Caucasus

As Azerbaijan Pushes Back Against Moscow, Central Asia Watches

The recent diplomatic escalation between Azerbaijan and Russia appeared to have run its course in April, after Moscow agreed to pay compensation over the Azerbaijan Airlines crash in Kazakhstan. Instead, the dispute has entered a new phase, and its implications now reach beyond the South Caucasus. On July 6, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Russian Ambassador Mikhail Yevdokimov and handed him a formal note of protest over what Baku described as a Russian drone strike on a fuel station owned by Azerbaijan’s state energy company SOCAR in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region on the evening of July 5. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said the attack on SOCAR facilities in Ukraine was not an isolated incident. It cited previous strikes on the company’s gas distribution compressor station and oil depot in Odesa, which caused material damage and injured employees. Baku also pointed to earlier damage to the Azerbaijani embassy building in Kyiv and the honorary consulate in Kharkiv, calling on Moscow to investigate and comply with its obligations to protect civilian infrastructure and diplomatic missions. At the same time, Shusha — known to Armenians as Shushi, retaken by Azerbaijan during the 2020 Karabakh war, and still regarded by many Armenians as occupied — hosted an international conference devoted to what participants described as Russia’s “colonial policy,” the “Circassian genocide,” and the situation of non-Russian peoples within the Russian Federation. The conference declaration called on Moscow to “recognize its historical crimes, abandon its chauvinistic policies, and end the forced recruitment of ethnic minorities into the war against Ukraine.” Experts from Azerbaijan, the United States, France, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Türkiye, and Georgia attended the conference. None of the Central Asian republics was represented. That absence was telling. Central Asian governments may be distancing themselves from Moscow in certain areas, but they remain reluctant to participate in openly anti-Russian political initiatives. For Astana, Tashkent, Bishkek, Dushanbe, and Ashgabat, the question is not whether Russia’s position has weakened, but how far they can move without provoking pressure from Moscow. For Central Asia, the dispute is not a distant quarrel in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan is now a central link in the westward routes that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan are trying to strengthen as alternatives to Russian territory. The Middle Corridor runs from China through Central Asia, across the Caspian Sea, and onward through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Türkiye to Europe. Any deterioration in Azerbaijan-Russia relations therefore has practical implications for Central Asian transit, energy, and diplomatic room for maneuver. The first major rupture in relations between Baku and Moscow came after Azerbaijan Airlines Flight J2-8243, traveling from Baku to Grozny, was damaged by Russian air-defense fire over Russian territory on December 25, 2024. The aircraft later crashed while attempting an emergency landing near Aktau, Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. Azerbaijan blamed Russia and demanded an apology, accountability, and compensation. Relations deteriorated further in June 2025 following the detention of ethnic Azerbaijanis in Yekaterinburg and reports of torture. The most prominent victims were the...

Middle Corridor

Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan Are Reinforcing the Middle Corridor’s South Caucasus Link

On April 7 Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Yermek Kosherbayev visited Tbilisi to hold talks with Georgian Foreign Minister Maka Bochorishvili and sign a 2026–2027 foreign-ministry cooperation program. He called Georgia “a key link” in the Europe–Asia transport architecture and said the common task was to raise corridor capacity, improve service predictability, and ensure tariff transparency. The materialization of the bilateral cooperation is already evident from last June’s opening of the Poti multimodal terminal by a joint Kazakhstani-Georgian company. The real meaning of Kosherbayev's discussions in Tbilisi lies in their context. On April 2 in Baku, Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov said Kazakhstan plans an intergovernmental agreement with Azerbaijan this year to strengthen the status of the Middle Corridor (also known as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Corridor, TITR), and he proposed moving quickly on the Digital Monitoring Center under the Organization of Turkic States (OTS). On April 6 in Tbilisi, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev called the Azerbaijan–Georgia segment the corridor’s “main transport artery.” Then on April 8 in Baku, Aliyev received Kosherbayev together with Kazakhstan’s transport minister. The official readout ranged from the Middle Corridor to joint investment, green-energy, and fiber-optic projects. Kosherbayev’s April 7 stop in Tbilisi thus belongs to a short Kazakhstan-led diplomatic run across the corridor’s western nodes. Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan Tighten the Corridor Kazakhstan’s early-April engagement in the South Caucasus rests on its eastward-looking framework with China. Two China–Kazakhstan documents were already in evidence in October 2023: a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on deepening the development of the China-Europe Railway Trans-Caspian route, and an intergovernmental agreement on developing that route. China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) subsequently clarified that the agreement focused on stronger transit organization, fewer administrative barriers, and improved logistics and transport operations. In July 2024, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping jointly attended the opening of the Trans-Caspian direct fast transport service; NDRC then recorded a work mechanism with Kazakhstan’s transport ministry to carry that cooperation forward. On January 1, the first Trans-Caspian train of 2026 departed Xi’an for Baku carrying 45 containers of photovoltaic equipment. Chinese reports assert that the route had accumulated 466 runs by the end of November 2025, moved onto a weekly six-outbound and three-inbound timetable, and cut travel times from the roughly 20-day average recorded in 2025 to a standard 15 days, with the fastest runs taking 11 days. On April 3, it was also reported that there were 85 Xi’an Trans-Caspian trains in the first quarter of 2026, up 150% year-on-year, while the Kazakhstan–Xi’an terminal in Almaty handled more than 6,000 containers in that quarter alone, a 60% increase from a year earlier. A separate quasi-official Chinese trade-services portal reported that Trans-Caspian trains had reached daily service and that 371 such trains had run in January–October 2025, up 33%. China’s NDRC also said in late 2025 that Aktau and Baku should be strengthened as hub nodes in this corridor system. Azerbaijan is the indispensable partner without which the route’s western logic does not function. Bektenov’s...

Iran

OTS Faces Security Test from Turkey to Central Asia

Iran's widening war has now reached the institutional space linking Turkey, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia. Turkey said on March 4 that NATO air defenses destroyed an Iranian ballistic missile entering Turkish airspace, while Azerbaijan said the next day that four Iranian drones crossed into Nakhchivan, injuring four people, and damaging civilian infrastructure at the exclave’s airport. Iran denied targeting Nakhchivan; in the Turkish case, the missile’s intended target has not been fully clear in public reporting. Even so, the combined effect was unmistakable. By March 7, the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) had become more than a bystander to a Middle Eastern war that had earlier seemed outside its main agenda. This is what gave the OTS foreign ministers’ meeting in Istanbul its significance. The Turkish Foreign Ministry announced on March 6 that the informal meeting of the OTS Council of Foreign Ministers would be held in Istanbul on March 7, with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan hosting. After the meeting, the ministers adopted a joint statement declaring that threats to the security of any OTS member are a matter of concern for the whole organization. That language does not make the OTS a military alliance. It does, however, show the organization moving more openly into collective political-security signaling when member states come under attack. Why Nakhchivan Matters Nakhchivan is central to the logic of this story. The exclave is an integral part of Azerbaijan, but is separated from the rest of the country. It borders Armenia, Iran, and Turkey, making it significant out of proportion to its size. A military strike there is not a routine border incident. It reaches one of the most sensitive nodes in the wider Turkic political space: it is a meeting point for Azerbaijani sovereignty, Turkish strategic concern, and Iranian proximity. Until recently, Nakhchivan’s special status and borders were anchored in the 1921 Moscow and Kars treaties, which gave Turkey and Soviet Russia a formal say over the exclave’s autonomy and, it could be argued, its external security. But last year, Baku folded Nakhchivan more tightly into Azerbaijan’s domestic legal order by removing those references (along with other changes) from the constitution of the exclave, which has suddenly become a target in a much wider regional confrontation. Baku’s response to the Iranian attack showed that it saw the incident in political as well as tactical terms. President Ilham Aliyev said Azerbaijan would prepare retaliatory measures. Reuters later reported that Azerbaijan had ordered the evacuation of its diplomats from Iran, citing safety concerns. This is understandable, particularly in light of the January 27, 2023, incident when an armed attacker entered Azerbaijan’s embassy in Tehran and opened fire, killing the head of the embassy’s security and wounding two other staff. Baku called this a terrorist attack, evacuated most of its diplomatic personnel, and suspended embassy operations. Azerbaijani officials also said the March 5 attack on Nakhchivan violated international law, rejecting any implication that it could have been a technical mishap. The stakes widened further after...

Board of Peace

Central Asia and Azerbaijan on Board as the Gaza Peace Effort Gets Underway

As the Trump Administration is trying to drag the world toward the reconstruction of Gaza, an undertaking fraught with security, political, and economic challenges, a gap is emerging between the “old” Europe, skeptical of Trump, and nation-states seeking to expand cooperation with Washington. Central Asian and Caucasian "middle powers" are among the emerging allies in the Trump Administration's latest diplomatic gambit for peace. Kazakhstan took a leadership position as the first Muslim-majority state outside the Middle East to join the Abraham Accords in November 2025. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, an experienced diplomat, former Foreign Minister, and high-level U.N. official, represented his country at the Board of Peace inauguration during the January 2026 session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. So did Ilham Aliev, President of Azerbaijan, and his First Lady and First Vice President, Mehriban, both of whom met with Trump in Davos. The attendance and participation of leaders of other majority-Muslim states outside the Middle East are also noteworthy. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan, Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia, Vjosa Osmani-Sadriu of Kosovo, and Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan signed the Charter on behalf of their respective nations. Those who chose not to participate are equally noteworthy. France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Portugal, Canada, and Australia, which publicly announced or reaffirmed recognition of a State of Palestine around the U.N. General Assembly in September 2025, each determined not to attend the signing ceremony at Davos, despite the fact that the establishment of the Board was officially welcomed by the UN Security Council in November 2025. This underscores the challenges that will arise as Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict enters its second phase, which foresees Hamas’ disarmament. Similarly, differences in policy toward Israel among the Muslim-majority countries that signed the Charter speak to the complexity of the Board’s task. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan have longstanding diplomatic and trade relations with Israel. This contrasts with the complex and often hostile stances of Qatar, long ruled by the Al Thani family, and Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, both of which support the Muslim Brotherhood and shelter Hamas terrorists. Then there are countries like Indonesia and Pakistan, which have never had diplomatic relations with Israel. Indonesia, under Subianto, continues to condition recognition of Israel on the creation of a Palestinian state. Pakistan has been officially hostile since its founding, and is particularly fearful of Jerusalem’s increasingly close relations with India, though it does have a history of covert information sharing and unofficial cooperation. Once again, navigating the political agendas and moving the reconstruction project forward will require a multi-dimensional chess game. Nevertheless, the Trump White House is working on the Board of Peace's first meeting, set for February 19th. Currently, there is no official word about whether the leaders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will attend, while other leaders plan to, such as President Aliyev, who just signed a Strategic Partnership Charter during a visit by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance to Azerbaijan, and PM Nikol Pashinyan of...

Middle Corridor

How Could the Armenia-Azerbaijan Peace Accord Benefit Central Asia?

On August 8, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a peace accord in Washington and committed to the construction of the Trump Route for Peace and Prosperity, a trade route that bisects Armenia, connecting the two parts of Azerbaijan. The deal may have far-reaching repercussions on the other side of the Caspian, potentially diversifying the Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor by allowing travel from Azerbaijan, through Armenia, and onwards to Turkey. The upbeat mood music may be premature, however. There remain numerous political hurdles to be jumped before any construction can commence, and the entry of the United States into a region where Russia, Iran, and Turkey all have interests could have unintended consequences. “It’s certainly an opportunity, but there are risks,” said Azerbaijani political analyst and non-resident fellow at the China-Global South Project, Yunis Sharifli. “The United States can be a stabilizing force, but it could go in the opposite direction. It can also create a spoiler.” The Problem Armenia and Azerbaijan have maintained ice-cold relations for almost their entire existence as independent states. For over three decades, they tussled over the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, a land which lies in the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan, but was, upon independence, populated mainly by Armenians. As well as costing thousands of lives and leading to hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, the enmity has also led to shuttered frontiers, which have choked trade across the South Caucasus. Armenia’s borders with both Azerbaijan and Turkey have been closed since 1993. While Armenia has been cut off from two of its four neighbors, Azerbaijan has also been severed in two, with the exclave of Nakhchivan, which borders Turkey, separated from the rest of the country by a sliver of Armenian territory, just 20 miles wide at its narrowest point. Conflicts in 2016, 2020, and 2023 saw Azerbaijan push Armenian troops from the region, with hundreds of thousands of Armenians fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh in fear of Azerbaijani reprisals. Since then, Baku has used its vast military superiority and geopolitical advantage to try to strongarm Armenia into accepting the construction of a corridor across its territory, threatening to use force on numerous occasions if Yerevan did not agree to its demands. The Solution Starting early this year, the United States began facilitating secretive negotiations between the pair, stepping into the vacuum left by Russia. The Kremlin has been sidelined from the process amid its deteriorating relations with both sides – many Armenians view Moscow as having betrayed them in the conflicts of 2020 and 2023, while Azeri-Russian relations have frayed significantly since the shooting down of Azerbaijan Airways Flight 8243 to Grozny earlier this year. The timing of the signing ceremony, on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, was perhaps designed to reflect this shift in geopolitical alignment in the South Caucasus. Baku and Yerevan have signed up to a project which will see the construction of the corridor run by a U.S. private company, but under the laws of the Republic of Armenia. The...