Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will travel to a part of Azerbaijan that’s cut off from the rest of the country on Monday as he seeks to capitalize on regional turbulence to advance plans for a trade route through the Caucasus.
Erdogan will visit Naxcivan, an exclave that borders Turkey, Armenia and Iran, less than a week after Azerbaijan carried out a military campaign to take full control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that’s been at the center of a territorial dispute with neighboring Armenia for more than three decades.
The Turkish leader’s push could stoke tensions further as he backs Azerbaijan’s demand for a transport corridor across southern Armenia to Naxcivan following last week’s attack in Nagorno-Karabakh that drew condemnation from the US and Europe before a belated intervention by Russia pushed the Armenians in the territory effectively to surrender.
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Armenia rejects Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s demand and the corridor doesn’t exist in a truce agreement brokered by Russia that ended a 2020 war between the neighboring states, which provides only for the opening of borders and transport links. Armenia has a defense pact with Russia to protect it against attack, though relations with the Kremlin are strained after the government in Yerevan accused Moscow of failing to support it in last week’s fighting.
Iran has also rejected the idea, which would risk cutting the Islamic Republic off from vital trade routes to Russia, and has staged military drills near its border with Azerbaijan amid deteriorating relations with Aliyev.
Erdogan and Aliyev will discuss Nagorno-Karabakh, open a modernized military installation in Naxcivan and attend a ground-breaking ceremony for a natural-gas pipeline to the exclave from the Turkish border province of Igdir, according to the Turkish president’s office. The pipeline is expected to help diversify Naxcivan’s gas imports away from Iran.
Turkey regards the corridor to Azerbaijan as key to its aspirations to become a trade route linking London and Beijing with railroads and highways. At the same time, Erdogan and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan are in talks on estalishing formal diplomatic relations and opening their border, which Turkey closed in 1993 in support of Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.
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Relations between Baku and Tehran deteriorated after the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Armed with Israeli and Turkish drones, Azerbaijan’s forces reclaimed control of large swaths of its territory occupied by Armenia since the early 1990s before Russia brokered the cease-fire.