Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on October 9 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on the sidelines of the Commonwealth of Independent States summit meeting. It was their first extended encounter since 2022.

The Kremlin’s official release described the exchange as “a detailed discussion of key issues on the bilateral agenda” and emphasized that “both sides expressed satisfaction with the positive dynamics of cooperation.”

Azerbaijan’s presidential website highlighted that bilateral relations “have developed successfully this year not only in trade and economic areas but also across all other fields.”

The meeting followed months of limited contact after Russian air defenses downed an Azerbaijani civilian aircraft in December 2024 over Dagestan in southern Russia.

Against all odds, the aircraft crossed the Caspian Sea and crash-landed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, with 29 survivors. The incident froze high-level communication after Russia dissembled over the facts and tried to avoid blame.

During the Dushanbe session, Putin publicly acknowledged Russian responsibility for the crash and pledged compensation. That admission, Moscow’s first of its kind, bridged a year-long rift and reopened a channel that had been constrained since the start of 2023.

It holds the potential to modify the correlation of geopolitical forces around the Caspian Sea basin, the zone that connects South Caucasus diplomacy with Central Asian connectivity geoeconomics.

For Moscow, reconciliation moves toward restoring a modicum of influence in a region where its standing had weakened following setbacks in Armenia. For Baku, it consolidates diplomatic flexibility without diluting autonomy.

The significance of the Dushanbe meeting lies in how both sides will proceed to convert restored relations into balancing and cooperation on energy and transport.

Transit diplomacy and corridor coordination

The immediate consequences of the Dushanbe meeting concern the geometry of Eurasian transit. The relevance of the Middle Corridor, a multimodal route crossing Azerbaijan and linking Central Asia to Europe through Georgia and Turkey, has grown amid shifting sanctions regimes and rerouted supply chains.

In 2024, freight volume along the Middle Corridor—more formally known as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR)—reached record levels, confirming its rise as a credible alternative to northern transit lines through Russia.

Container traffic in the first nine months of 2024 increased roughly 70% from the previous year, driven by cross-Caspian coordination among Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Azerbaijan’s transport authorities reported that since 2022, total cargo through the Middle Corridor has risen by nearly 90%.

Moscow may gain greater situational awareness of these developments following the Dushanbe meeting, but it is unlikely to gain a seat at the planning table. It is not evident that Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan or any other participating state would grant Russia any co-managerial status over cross-Caspian infrastructure.

Baku’s policy remains to insulate corridor operations from external vetoes, while Ashgabat continues to treat Caspian cooperation as a matter of bilateral pragmatism rather than alliance.

The Russian–Azerbaijani thaw may ease peripheral bilateral irritants, such as customs recognition, overflight coordination or maritime insurance for Caspian shipping, but it does not herald joint project design.

For Azerbaijan, reopening direct communication with Moscow may help neutralize a potential spoiler. Baku can continue to pursue its logistics strategy without open interference from Moscow, which can now claim to be “engaged” in regional transit affairs. 

The Middle Corridor’s western and eastern components remain firmly anchored in cooperation among Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Turkey.

Perpendicular to that, the project for the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) through Iran may eventually serve as a complementary rather than competing route.

The coexistence of such systems would reflect Azerbaijan’s long-standing strategy to maintain flexibility across all corridors while keeping operational control in national hands.

Azerbaijan’s reaffirmed leverage

For President Aliyev, the Dushanbe meeting reaffirmed a diplomatic strategy that has defined Azerbaijani foreign policy for over a decade: pursue engagement with Russia when useful, but preserve the autonomy gained through diversified partnerships with Turkey, the Gulf, the European Union, and the United States.

The reset with Moscow strengthens Baku’s ability to manage that balance rather than narrowing it.

Aliyev’s approach to foreign relations has long relied on simultaneous participation in overlapping frameworks such as the Organization of Turkic States, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Eastern Partnership dialogues with the EU.

Each serves as a counterweight to overdependence on any single actor. Renewed contact with Russia therefore functions as a stabilizer; it reduces the risk of unpredictable friction without reviving the asymmetric bilateral relationship of the past.

From a security standpoint, Azerbaijan’s calculus remains shaped by geography: proximity to Russia requires pragmatism, but energy and trade routes bind Baku westward.

The country’s role in supplying gas to southeastern Europe through the Southern Gas Corridor, including the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) and Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), reinforces its independence in external policy.

By expanding these export volumes while maintaining technical cooperation with Russian entities in limited areas such as power-grid synchronization, Azerbaijan demonstrates that coexistence does not entail submission.

The Dushanbe thaw also serves a domestic function. It assures Azerbaijan’s business and logistics sectors that regional stability is improving, which can encourage foreign investment in port and rail infrastructure at Alat, Baku’s principal maritime hub.

Yet Aliyev’s government continues to draw a clear boundary: cooperation with Russia is transactional and bounded by economic logic, not ideology. In this sense, Baku’s diplomatic leverage after Dushanbe rests on controlled proximity.

Russia’s re-engagement restores channels of communication, but Azerbaijan dictates the scope and pace. The result is a relationship that stabilizes immediate security conditions while preserving long-term strategic flexibility.

From rhetoric to reality

The next phase of the Dushanbe reset will determine whether political adjustments visible from Yerevan to Tashkent can yield measurable results in the physical and procedural infrastructure connecting them.

The meeting’s importance in the longer run will be judged on the basis of what Moscow and Baku implement over the coming year. Both governments have signaled interest in pragmatic follow-through.

In August 2024, Azerbaijan completed the first expansion stage of the Baku International Sea Trade Port, increasing annual cargo capacity to 25 million tons. That upgrade positions Baku to handle additional freight from Central Asia under the Middle Corridor while integrating new digital customs platforms aligned with EU standards.

Russia, for its part, seeks to sustain access to southward trade through the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC). Construction on the 162-kilometer Rasht–Astara rail segment inside Iran—financed jointly by Moscow and Tehran—resumed in mid-2024, with completion expected by 2027.

The degree to which these projects are implemented will show whether the Dushanbe thaw matures into structured cooperation. For this to occur, practical outcomes are necessary: formal agreements on transit guarantees, standardized documentation and shared maritime safety procedures.

Managed normalization of bilateral relations?

The Dushanbe reset closes one phase of estrangement between Moscow and Baku while opening a more complex phase of negotiated coexistence. The meeting hardly signifies Russia’s return as a regional arbiter; indeed, it marks Moscow’s acquiescence to a narrower bandwidth of influence.

As for Azerbaijani–Russian relations, the practical test of reconciliation will arrive when the official investigation into the December 2024 air crash concludes later this year.

Moscow’s official apology and compensation, representing full acceptance of responsibility, would close this chapter, which is the most serious breach in bilateral relations since independence. Yet not all aspects of the relationship will revert to earlier patterns.

Baku has no intention of allowing the return of Russian state-media outlets such as Sputnik Azerbaijan, which were shut down as part of a broader policy to insulate domestic discourse from external influence. The government’s position is that information sovereignty is integral to national security.

For its part, Moscow may ease the pressure it has exerted on segments of the Azerbaijani diaspora within Russia, although this moderation is likely to remain partial.

Full normalization is constrained by the broader evolution of Russian policy toward post-Soviet diasporas, which is shaped by the rise of nationalist discourse at home.

For Azerbaijan, this readjustment represents an opportunity: the acceptance of a limited reconciliation converts potential friction into strategic insulation. The real dividend is its enhanced ability to pursue its own corridor policy without interference.

The arrangement works precisely because it defines the boundaries of engagement: communication channels with Moscow have been restored, but the latter’s leverage has been contained while Baku’s own autonomy is preserved.

Conclusion

In this sense, the Dushanbe meeting is a microcosm of the new dynamics of the Caspian Sea basin. The reset between Russia and Azerbaijan contributes to the normalization of an increasingly interactive environment where competition and coordination reinforce each other.

The Caspian Sea basin was once the object of hierarchical influence, but it has become a network of intersecting sovereignties where cooperation and rivalry coexist.

Here, the Middle Corridor, the International North–South Transport Corridor, and smaller cross-border routes adjust continuously to one another’s capacity, tariffs, and political risk.

Almost paradoxically, the networked competition produces reciprocal interdependence, generating a pragmatic balance that favors procedural discipline over hierarchy.

Robert M Cutler is director and senior research fellow, Energy Security Program, NATO Association of Canada and senior fellow in geoeconomics and strategic negotiations at Strategy International. He was previously a senior researcher at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University.