Azernews.Az

By Kamila Aliyeva

Tripartite meetings with participation of Azerbaijan and Turkey will resume in summer, said Erkan Ozoral, Ankara’s Ambassador to Baku.

“We were waiting for the completion of the referendum [in Turkey] to hold a trilateral meeting with the participation of Azerbaijan and Turkey,” APA cited the ambassador as saying.

Noting that this year’s first trilateral meeting maybe held in summer, Ozoral added that the meeting format depends on the readiness of the third country.

Currently, there are several trilateral formats in the region such as Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey, Azerbaijan-Turkey-Iran and Azerbaijan-Turkey-Turkmenistan. Besides, a new trilateral format is emerging between Azerbaijan, Turkey and Russia .

Multilateral formats improve political and economic ties between the countries and provide serious support to regional development.

The Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey format is the most functional, as the cooperation is supported by huge trade, energy and transportation projects.

The sides jointly implemented such large-scale projects as the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project is expected to further strengthen the neighborly and fraternal relations among the three countries and enable the countries to supply domestically produced goods to the world markets.

Azerbaijan and Turkey are the key countries in all the mentioned interstate structures. It might be explained by the fact that Azerbaijan–Turkey relations have always been strong, mostly described as "one nation with two states".

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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