Azerbaijan, Russia discuss issues related to Caspian Sea

On May 30, Moscow hosted bilateral consultations between Azerbaijan and Russia on the issues of the Caspian Sea.

Report was told in the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan that during the meeting, a wide range of issues related to the five-sided cooperation in the Caspian Sea was discussed.

Within the framework of the consultations, an exchange of views also took place on the methodology for constructing direct lines of access to the Caspian Sea and draft agreements on issues of sectoral cooperation that are being agreed between the Caspian states, as well as on security issues in the Caspian region.

The unresolved status of the Caspian Sea is a legacy of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

In 2018, the presidents from five Caspian littoral states - Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan all met in Aktau, Kazakhstan where they signed a landmark agreement settling a decades-old geopolitical dispute between them, namely how to divide up the waters of the Caspian Sea.

“The Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea” addressed how each of the five countries – four of them created in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the USSR – would share the waters of what is the world’s largest lake. Prospects for new maritime shipping and tourism routes were an outgrowth of the agreement. According to the document, routes for the construction of oil and gas pipelines under the Caspian’s waters are to be agreed upon by those countries that own sectors through which a maritime pipeline would be laid.

The countries may lay underwater pipelines only if their projects comply with environmental requirements and standards specified in international treaties to which they are a party. The fate of some rich oil and gas deposits lying beneath the seabed remains unresolved, however.