Putin and Aliyev refrain from talking

The presidents of Russia and Azerbaijan met in Beijing and shook hands, exchanging a few words. Putin expressed confidence that despite the current problems, Moscow and Baku are interested in developing relations and they will be restored.

The presidents of Russia and Azerbaijan, Vladimir Putin and Ilham Aliyev, simply greeted each other in Beijing, where celebrations were held to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov said today.

"They greeted each other with Aliyev, shook hands, but, in fact, there was no substantive communication this time," Interfax quoted Peskov as saying.

Vladimir Putin said that he exchanged "two or three words" with the head of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, in Beijing. "Today, President Aliyev and I greeted him and his wife. We exchanged a few words," TASS quoted him as saying.

Commenting on the relationship between Moscow and Baku, the Russian president noted that "some questions always arise in relations between countries, based on the current situation or some political situation, and there are problems." "But I believe that the fundamental relations between Azerbaijan and Russia and mutual interest in their development will ultimately put everything in its place," the publication says.

Relations between Moscow and Baku have noticeably worsened since the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane with 67 people on board in Kazakhstan on December 25, 2024, flying from Baku to Grozny. You can read more about this in the "Caucasian Knot" reference "Baku-Grozny flight crash" and in the material "Geopolitical confrontation: what the crash of the AZAL plane led to".

On June 28, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry called on the Russian authorities to investigate the deaths and injuries of Azerbaijanis who suffered on June 27 as a result of a special operation by security forces in Yekaterinburg. Experts in Baku called blunt force trauma the cause of death of brothers Guseyn and Ziyaddin Safarov, while the Russian side called the cause of death a heart attack.

The ethnic raids in Russia and the retaliatory detentions of Russians in Azerbaijan became a new round of deterioration in relations between the two countries. Baku accuses the Russian authorities of extrajudicial reprisals against Azerbaijanis, and footage of the brutal detention of Russians in Baku looks like a demonstrative response to Moscow's actions, according to the "Caucasian Knot" report "Crisis in relations between Azerbaijan and Russia".

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