Category: Azer News

Two Azerbaijani sailors have been killed after a vessel carrying four Azerbaijani citizens came under repeated drone attacks in the Black Sea off the coast of Odesa, according to information from Azerbaijani sources.

The Somali-flagged tugboat TEDY was initially targeted by drones while operating near Odesa. Four Azerbaijani citizens were on board the vessel at the time of the attack.

The damaged vessel later came under two further drone attacks while sailing towards the Romanian port of Constan?a.

The attacks resulted in the deaths of two Azerbaijani sailors, Aslan Aliyev and Asim Gasimov.

Two other Azerbaijani citizens who were on board were injured and have been hospitalised in Odesa.

The circumstances surrounding the attacks, including the parties responsible, have not been established in the information currently available.

Cooperation between the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA) and the World Bank (WB), as well as ongoing technical assistance projects, were discussed.

According to the CBA, the discussions took place during a meeting between CBA Chairman Taleh Kazimov and a World Bank delegation led by Roland Pryce, the World Bank’s Regional Director for the South Caucasus.

During the meeting, the current state of cooperation between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the World Bank, the implementation of activities envisaged under the Country Partnership Framework, ongoing investment projects, and future prospects were discussed.

CBA Chairman Taleh Kazimov congratulated Sasha Baeks, the newly appointed World Bank Country Manager for Azerbaijan, and wished her success in her new position.

The meeting also included an exchange of views on cooperation between the Central Bank and the World Bank and the implementation of ongoing technical assistance projects.

Israel has opened its embassy in Ljubljana. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attended the opening ceremony.

“This is the fifth new Israeli embassy opened in the past year and a half. We have friends in Europe and around the world, and we must strengthen our relations and cooperation with them. I will continue expanding Israel’s diplomatic network around the world,” Sa’ar wrote on his X page following the ceremony.

Israel and Slovenia established diplomatic relations in 1992, but Israel had not previously maintained an embassy in Ljubljana. Its interests in Slovenia were represented by Austrian diplomats.

The decision to open an Israeli embassy in Slovenia was made in June, following a change of government in the country.

The trip to Slovenia comes a day after the United Kingdom banned trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and France and Canada announced they would take similar action.

Wheat, tomatoes, sweet peppers and leafy greens could become the first crops grown on future lunar bases.

Four types of crops – wheat, sweet peppers, tomatoes and leafy greens – are being considered for cultivation in space facilities designed to resemble future lunar bases.

Margarita Levinskikh, Academic Secretary of the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Doctor of Biological Sciences, told TASS about the plans.

‘Tomatoes are, in principle, one of the four crops planned for cultivation in space facilities similar to a lunar base. These include wheat, sweet peppers, tomatoes and leafy greens,’ she said on the sidelines of a press conference presenting the results of the ‘Into Space with Your Tomato’ project.

However, developing new plant varieties adapted to space is a highly complex process. Future space crops would need to withstand harsh environmental conditions while also meeting specific physical requirements, such as having a suitable size for cultivation in confined spacecraft or lunar habitats.

As part of the project, Russian and Belarusian schoolchildren worked with researchers from the IBMP to send seeds of four tomato varieties – Pinnocchio, Groshik, Donetsky and Bull’s Heart – into space aboard the Bion-M No. 2 biosatellite in August-September 2025.

The students then germinated the space-flown seeds alongside identical control seeds kept on Earth. The experiment was designed to examine how factors such as microgravity, extreme temperatures and cosmic radiation could affect seed germination and plant development.

Interestingly, the tomatoes that had spent time in space retained their main biochemical characteristics. However, researchers detected changes at a much more subtle level – within molecular mechanisms.

According to Levinskikh, some of the seeds could potentially develop changes in their genetic material in the future. If such changes prove stable and beneficial, they could eventually contribute to the development of new varieties specifically adapted to growing beyond Earth.

In other words, the tomatoes flying into space today could one day help scientists grow food on the Moon – and perhaps even on Mars.

Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, said Wednesday that he had severed all ties with Turkish interests in Uganda and called on Turkish nationals to leave the country. He also ordered his political supporters to demonstrate outside the Turkish Embassy in Kampala on September 18.

‘I have already severed anything to do with the Turks in Uganda. They should pack their bags as soon as possible and get out of our country,’ Kainerugaba wrote on X.

About two hours later, he announced the planned protest and named the person responsible for organizing it.

‘We are demonstrating in full force at the Turkish Embassy on the 18th of September. Hon. Fadhil is in charge of this demonstration. PLU better do a good job. My order will not change this time. Instead we will arrest ANY Turkish agent who says anything different!’ he wrote.

PLU, or the Patriotic League of Uganda, is the political group chaired by Kainerugaba. Supporters responding to his post said they had received the order.

There was no corresponding statement from Uganda’s Foreign Ministry or President Yoweri Museveni, who is Kainerugaba’s father.

A long-running dispute

Kainerugaba’s latest statements are part of a dispute with Turkey that has played out publicly for months.

In April, he demanded $1 billion from Ankara over Uganda’s military role in Somalia and threatened to close the Turkish Embassy and block Turkish Airlines operations.

In June, he claimed Uganda had cancelled a multibillion-dollar Standard Gauge Railway contract with Turkish construction company Yapi Merkezi. He also said Turkish citizens had been given 30 days to leave Uganda and called for protests outside the Turkish Embassy, although those demonstrations were later postponed.

A central issue in the dispute has been Uganda’s demand that Turkey hand over or expel Fred Lumbuye, a Ugandan critic of the government.

Wednesday’s posts effectively revive that campaign, this time setting September 18 as the date for a demonstration and threatening the arrest of anyone on the Turkish side who ‘says anything different.’

What remains unclear

Kainerugaba is Uganda’s top military officer and a senior presidential adviser, but he is not the country’s foreign minister. His posts on X, by themselves, do not constitute a formal government order expelling Turkish nationals or severing diplomatic relations with Turkey.

They do, however, amount to a direct instruction to his political network to mobilize outside a foreign embassy on September 18, following months of increasingly public tensions between Kainerugaba and Turkish interests in Uganda.

Houthi rebels in western Yemen are mounting a major offensive toward the coastal cities of Mocha and Dhubab, positioning themselves within striking distance of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait-one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints.

The Iran-backed group is seeking to secure total dominance over Yemen’s Red Sea coast. A successful push into the Bab-el-Mandeb area would grant the Houthis leverage over a waterway that links the Red Sea directly to the Gulf of Aden, serving as a primary artery for trade moving between Europe and Asia.

Military analysts warning of the advance note that Houthi control over the strait could spark severe disruptions to global supply chains. The vulnerability of the maritime corridor has been heightened by recent volatility around the Strait of Hormuz, leaving international shipping increasingly dependent on Bab-el-Mandeb to keep transcontinental commerce flowing.

Nakhchivan has long been a geographical enigma of sorts: an enclave of Azerbaijan inhabited by about 460,000 people, cut off from the rest of Azerbaijan by territory controlled by Armenia and accessible only by land through Iran or Trkiye. Until recently, that geography has made the place a liability rather than an asset for Azerbaijan, which has been treating the area as such. However, a new amendment to the socio-economic development program of Nakhchivan for the years 2023-2027 seems to indicate a change in that mentality. The document is based on the premise that a much-needed piece of infrastructure is going to come online soon – a Zangezur corridor [TRIPP] connecting Nakhchivan with Azerbaijan through the southern Armenian province of Syunik.

The revised plan is light on numericals but heavy on intent, which itself reveals much. These include “targeted logistical support systems” for exporters, undefined tax and freight discounts that will “stimulate the comprehensive usage” of the corridor, and an enhanced entrepreneurial program when the route is open for business. Governments generally don’t revise five-year economic plans around infrastructure that exists only in theory. This decree should be understood as the Azerbaijani government gearing up to act quickly once the politics of the corridor – mainly the conflicting views on transit control rights held by Yerevan and Moscow through Syunik are sorted out.

Numbers behind the ambition

Nakhchivan’s economy has traditionally operated based on budget transfers rather than exports. In 2023, the overall economic output in the autonomous republic amounted to 1.55bn manats ($910m), where the share of industry amounted to 593.9 mln manats ($349 mln), while the agriculture sector produced 358.4 mln manats ($210 mln). However, there was a dramatic turn of events: between 2023 and 2025, Nakhchivan’s GDP increased by 7.6%, industrial production – by 4.6%, and, interestingly, transport and warehousing increased their operations by 25.7%, having already outperformed all other sectors in growth before the corridor was even completed. Investments in fixed assets have increased 2.5 times in this timeframe, while construction and installation works have more than doubled. The development of entrepreneurial lending took the same path: from 2023, 342 projects were supported by the region’s Entrepreneurship Development Fund, amounting to 27.2 mln manats ($15.2 mln) of concessional loans, 77% of which were registered in 2025 and the first half of 2026.

As far as the actual infrastructure goes, however, the numbers are, predictably for an initiative of three countries, disputed. Azerbaijan’s very own approach roads have already neared completion: the 123.6km-long Horadiz-Jabrayil-Zangilan-Aghband road, comprising three tunnels amounting to 12km in total length, was claimed to be 95% finished by September 2025, with the rest of the works expected to be completed during the second half of 2026. The rail network in Azerbaijan consists of a 110km-long Horadiz-Aghband track capable of transporting up to 15 mln. tonnes of cargo and 5.5 mln. passengers per year once operational. Trkiye has started the construction of a 224km Kars-Igdir-Aralik-Dilucu railway line, which is to be a four-year project, whereas about 180km of tracks will need repairs or construction in Nakhchivan. The true bottleneck – the stretch going through sovereign Armenian territory – is the only part of the initiative on which estimates range wildly from 26km to 43.5km depending on the particular government official, and on which construction has yet to begin even in late 2026, according to Trkiye’s own transport minister.

It is a lesson that one suspects is learned through experience of other corridors, which did not measure up to expectations in terms of throughput because of the lack of locally produced goods to feed into them. A trans-Caspian transport corridor is only as good as the goods that transit through it, and any government that would like its corridor to be taken seriously would want to load it up with guaranteed cargo from within its borders – in this case, the produce from Nakhchivan – before relying on Eurasian cargo controlled by actors in Beijing, Ankara, or Brussels. Geography in that sense completes the argument for Baku. Nakhchivan already shares an 11-kilometre-long border with Trkiye, and investments by Trkiye into the exclave – whether in the form of joint universities or energy connections between the countries – have increased consistently over the past decade. So the region is structurally positioned to evolve into a Preferential Trade Area (PTA) or a specialized industrial border zone acting as a bridge between the Turkish and Azerbaijani economies.

If the Zangezur Corridor is built successfully, products from Nakhchivan could be as easily transported to the rest of Azerbaijan as to the east of Trkiye, effectively making producers in Nakhchivan available to two market routes instead of one. While nothing in the decree commits Azerbaijan to such a move, it is easy to foresee a time when Baku could institutionalize such a policy as a preferential trade zone along the Nakhchivan-Trkiye border, similar to free zones used in China’s Belt and Road project in order to attract manufacturing investment to a transit choke point.

Geopolitical dividend

Now that Azerbaijan’s budget itself has been diverting hydrocarbon profits towards those regions with little output of anything else, including Nakhchivan, the wider narrative of macroeconomics is on the go past this particular exclave. This strategy of moving away from simple budget subsidies to building out access through better logistical services, cheaper freight transportation, more efficient border control, and lower taxes is in many ways a more sustainable one than simply topping up an already existing budget entry each year. However, for it to work, there needs to be something to be done with all those facilities built: if there is no productive potential, then there are no incentives for it; this can be seen by how many special economic zones set up in post-Soviet countries turned into empty shells precisely because there was nothing to do there. The agricultural sector of Nakhchivan, while present, does not have much potential, and that is why the success of this order depends not so much on what incentives it contains but on whether Baku makes investments into real productive capacities.

The most intangible yet probably the most significant impact of this project is one that is strategic, rather than economic in nature. The fact that an exclave, which has an operational overland link to the rest of its own country, cannot be isolated, pressured or bargained with is not lost on Baku, considering its experiences of being under blockade and its dependency on Iran and Trkiye for sustaining itself. Creating several ways of delivering goods into the area as well as exporting goods from there, in this context, is not only an economic development strategy but also an insurance against any future turbulence in the region. It may still take some time until the corridor becomes operational on the schedule as expected by Baku, as this question is at the moment in the hands of Yerevan and Moscow, as much as in Azerbaijan.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s flight from Moldova to Norway was delayed following a drone threat in Moldovan airspace, according to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

Speaking to Norwegian broadcaster NRK on September 9, Støre said Zelensky’s aircraft had ‘almost collided with a drone’ when it was preparing to take off from Moldova.

‘This is the reality he lives with every day,’ the Norwegian prime minister said, without disclosing the source of the information.

Støre’s remarks did not make clear whether the drone incident was accidental or represented a deliberate attempt to target Zelensky.

The Norwegian Prime Minister’s Office later clarified that a drone threat had emerged in Moldovan airspace the previous day, causing a delay to Zelensky’s flight to Oslo.

‘It is not known how close the drones were to his aircraft,’ the office said.

Meanwhile, a senior Ukrainian official told Deutsche Welle that a Russian jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle had entered Moldovan airspace while Zelensky’s aircraft was waiting to depart from Chisinau.

Following the incident, Zelensky’s flight was postponed and other flights were also suspended, according to the Ukrainian official.

The incident occurred as Zelensky was traveling to Norway for talks with Norwegian officials.

Israeli opposition politicians have accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of pushing Israel into unprecedented international isolation following the United Kingdom’s decision to impose sanctions related to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid described the British measures as ‘wrong’ but directed his strongest criticism at Netanyahu’s government, accusing it of leading Israel ‘into unprecedented diplomatic isolation.’

According to Lapid, the government was responding to international pressure with little more than ‘rebukes and threats that no one takes seriously.’

Gilad Kariv, a Knesset member from the left-wing Democrats party, similarly blamed Israel’s far-right coalition for the British sanctions, citing the government’s policies concerning Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.

Kariv said Netanyahu’s government was steering Israel toward ‘international isolation’ and described the prime minister as politically ‘leprous’ on the international stage.

‘The citizens of Israel must not pay the price for his corrupt alliance with the nationalist fanatics,’ Kariv wrote on X, referring to Netanyahu’s far-right coalition.

Former attorney-general backs UK measures

Michael Ben-Yair, a former Israeli attorney-general, went further by welcoming the British measures, despite saying that he did not support punitive action being taken by one of Israel’s allies.

Writing in the Financial Times, Ben-Yair argued that such measures were necessary to preserve the possibility of a political solution capable of providing ‘peace and security for the seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.’

Ben-Yair said the distinction between Israel itself and its occupation of Palestinian territory was crucial. He argued that Israel’s legitimacy as a state should be distinguished from the occupation, which he described as ‘morally, politically and legally unacceptable.’

There is a particular kind of diplomatic choreography that gives away more than the speeches do. It must have raised questions as to who was courting whom when Ursula von der Leyen, Antonio Costa, and Kaja Kallas visited Baku over a period of ten months – the president of the European Commission, the president of the European Council, and the European Union’s chief foreign policy official, respectively – all making a beeline to a nation of ten million on the western shores of the Caspian Sea.

The official framing, delivered by the EU’s newly appointed ambassador to Azerbaijan, Marijana Kujundžic, at a roundtable in Baku last week, was suitably diplomatic. “We are entering a new phase of our relations,” she said. “They have intensified.” Negotiations on a new bilateral agreement, stalled for years, are set to resume at the end of September. The EU, she noted, remains Azerbaijan’s largest trading partner, three decades after the two sides signed their first partnership agreement in 1996.

All true, and all beside the more interesting point. There is definitely an ‘unevenness’ in the traffic of visitors between Brussels and Baku. Azerbaijani delegations visiting Brussels consist mostly of ministers, like Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeyhun Bayramov and Minister of Energy Parviz Shahbazov, whereas President Ilham Aliyev has not set foot in Brussels in years. Perhaps it is the only possible proof of which of the two parties needs the other. The reason is not hard to find, I assume.

With the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the urgent attempts by Europe to disengage itself from Russian gas supplies, Azerbaijan went almost overnight from being simply a useful secondary supplier to a near necessity. One of the pipelines supplying gas from Azerbaijan to the rest of Europe, via Georgia and Trkiye, through the Southern Gas Corridor, is one of the only non-Russian pipelines that the Europeans can boast about. By her own admission, von der Leyen’s main objective in Baku was the implementation of an agreement signed in 2022 according to which Azerbaijan undertook to increase gas deliveries to the EU by almost twofold up to 20 bn m3 annually until 2027, as well as the construction of the “Green Energy Cable” under the Black Sea.

For his part, Costa took advantage of his visit to Baku to argue for sustained EU engagement as mediator in the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, as well as Baku’s involvement in the development of the Middle Corridor, the Caspian transportation corridor that is now being mentioned in Brussels as a way around the Russian routes. Kallas’ concern, on the other hand, was even more straightforward: the military-political stability of the South Caucasus, cutting off the channels through which Moscow tries to circumvent Western sanctions, and creating a modicum of security structure in the Caspian-Black Sea basin.

Where the leverage runs out

This is when the EU’s old approach begins to show its limits. The Europeans have always made their agreements on trade and cooperation subject to certain criteria – regulatory convergence, human rights standards, judicial reform, and the trappings of their “values-based” diplomacy. But now, they are doing this even in Azerbaijan by advocating its entry into the WTO, lowering customs duties, granting access for European businesses, and above all, monitoring systems linked to civil and political freedoms.

But Baku is not having any of that. Azerbaijan has absolutely no intention of joining [at least for now] the WTO due to concerns about what it will do for the country’s agriculture and non-oil economy, but it wants to secure its own flexible trade agreement instead. Regarding the political prerequisites, the stance taken by Baku has been indisputable: there should be no interference in Azerbaijan’s internal affairs, period, and all relations should be based exclusively on “equal partnership and respect for sovereignty.” Taking into account the continuous flow of European Parliament resolutions regarding human rights in Azerbaijan and Baku’s perception of pro-Armenian bias in some of the EU institutions, this attitude has become one of distrust.

The only sphere in which convergence occurs without any friction is the one farthest removed from politics altogether: energy. In the case of the Green Energy Cable and the export of renewable energy to Europe, the interests of the two sides align clearly enough that the file has more or less negotiated itself. There could not be a more telling demonstration of how the priorities of the EU have shifted: whereas Brussels used to try to lead on the basis of values, and make the economic interest the carrot that was offered for good behaviour, it is now the economic interest doing the job of values-based diplomacy.

Perhaps, there is a deeper irony buried in Costa’s interest in the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process. The European Union clearly hopes to come across as the indispensable player bringing about stability in a region that, at long last, has made headway toward true peace after decades of war, given that it is technically the most effective peace agreement in the 21st century. This hope is less likely to be taken seriously in Baku because in recent years, Europe’s own institutions have been adopting resolutions which Azerbaijan sees as favoring the other side. One cannot both seek to establish oneself as an unbiased arbitrator and advocate for one of the sides.

What distinguishes this period from others in EU-Azerbaijani diplomacy is not the demand by Brussels of something from Baku because this has been the case throughout; what has changed now is that Baku, after three decades, has no great compulsion to make this easy. The traditional model of the European Union’s quid pro quo in exchange for market access rests on an imbalance that has ended.

None of this means the relationship is heading for rupture. Both sides have too much to lose. However, “inextricably linked” may be the way that the ambassador and his staff would refer to this situation privately. Nevertheless, “inextricably linked” does not necessarily mean “equal.” What this year’s events really show is an EU shifting from its preferred moralist diplomacy to its transactional realpolitik due to its anxieties about post-Ukraine energy needs, and an Azerbaijani government that will happily allow the EU to make the shift. When talks resume this month, the outcome worth watching is not whether a deal gets signed, but which side’s definition of “partnership” survives the negotiating table intact.