Baku Eliminates the Negative Background

Today a two-day official visit of the Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov to Moscow starts. At a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov they will discuss bilateral relations and international and regional issues. Experts believe that the visit by Mammadyarov is aimed at reducing the negative relations, which recently formed around the Russian-Azerbaijani affairs, says Moscow, "Nezavisimaya Gazeta".

As the deputy director of the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry for Russia Maria Zakharova said, the agenda of the talks between Lavrov and Mammadyarov includes problems of the Karabakh settlement, where Russia is one of the leading brokers in the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group. "Azerbaijan is our important strategic partner in the South Caucasus and the Caspian region," she said.

However, if we take a wider view of Russian-Azerbaijani relations, believes the analyst of the North-South Center, Alexei Vlasov, "the official Baku has not yet decided on how to build the country's policy with regard to external players."

"Today Baku has points of simultaneous tension on several fronts: the OSCE, Iran and the United States," Vlasov told NG. In particular, Elmar Mammadyarov, confirmed Baku's intention of lowering the status of the OSCE mission in Azerbaijan to the level of the coordinating council. However, he did not rule out the possibility of the participation of international observers in the upcoming elections.  If the status of the mission is lowered, the report of the OSCE will receive, in the best case, the status of an informal document.

The second point of tension is the arrest of Azerbaijani citizens in Iran and the third is the unhappiness of the United States following the closure of some NGOs which they financed.

As for relations with Russia, recent developments related to the denunciation of the agreements on the Gabala radar station or oil transit via the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, brought no problems. -0 -