Azerbaijan says major transport project hinges on Karabakh conflict
BAKU – Construction of a major highway around the Black Sea, one of the biggest transport projects in the region, depends on a settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s Transport Minister Ziya Mammadov has said.
Mammadov said in an interview with the governing Yeni (New) Azerbaijan Party (YAP) website that the Azerbaijani leaders’ position on the issue is "clear-cut and unchanged".
"Until the Nagorno Karabakh conflict has been fully resolved and Armenia has pulled out of the Azerbaijani territories it occupies, our cooperation with Yerevan is impossible either in a bilateral or a multilateral format," the minister said, but added that Baku supports the project "in general".
The ambitious project envisions building a 7,000 km road around the Black Sea crossing 12 countries – Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Moldova, Russia, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine.
Armenia remains sidelined from regional projects due to occupying neighboring Azerbaijan’s regions and only has a rail link with Georgia, another South Caucasus republic.
Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict for two decades. Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory since a war in the early 1990s.
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