SHUSHA, Azerbaijan, July 13. We did not expect our geography will be so needed in recent times, said President Ilham Aliyev during a meeting with participants of the 4th Shusha Global Media Forum.
"You know, we have been working on connectivity issues for quite a while. So maybe actively for more than ten years, trying to turn the advantages of our geographical location into a real platform for multinational cooperation, and there were various factors which could allow us, or not, or prevent us from becoming one of the international transportation destinations. The first was the physical infrastructure, which was missing, and we had to build it, which has been done. The second was interaction with our neighbors, because without that, you will never become a transit country. If you have bad relations with your neighbors, it means that nothing will come back and forth. And also we needed to establish broad international cooperation across the vast geography of Eurasia, to the East and to the West, to the North and to the South, from Azerbaijan, and to lead the process as we did, for instance, in implementing our energy projects, where Azerbaijan was the initiator, the main financial contributor, and the organizer of multinational cooperation, which today also helps many countries to tackle the issues of energy security.
So the same approach we apply to connectivity, and as I said, the physical infrastructure is done. And now we are only working on the issues of how to expand it, because we did not expect that our geography would be so needed in recent times. Interaction with neighbors to the East and to the West is excellent, whether it's with the countries of Central Asia or our immediate neighbors like Georgia and Türkiye, and Europe. And to connect all that, of course, we needed to initiate many steps that could enable the corridor to be efficient," the head of state said.
