Tehran is expecting to begin receiving Russian gas transferred through Azerbaijan, Iranian Ambassador to Russia Kazem Jalali has told the Russian state-run media outlet TASS.
‘We hope this will happen in the near term. We are currently negotiating with Gazprom, and almost all issues have been resolved. We just need to reach an agreement on the price. If that is settled, everything will be launched’, Jalali said.
The forthcoming deliveries stem from a deal inked in April 2025 between Iran and Russia, which in turn followed a memorandum of understanding signed between the Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom and its Iranian counterpart. At the time, the method of the delivery, and the disclosure that the gas would be transferred via Azerbaijan, was not revealed.
The route was then discussed by Russian Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilev earlier this year, who said that up to 1.8 billion cubic metres per year would begin flowing to Iran via existing infrastructure in Azerbaijan.
The agreement comes at a delicate period of relations between Azerbaijan and its neighbours to the north and south.
While Azerbaijan’s ties with Iran have appeared to be on the mend since some allegations from Tehran that Baku may have assisted Israel during the brief Israel–Iran war in June, tensions with Russia remain high.
Earlier in August, Russian drones struck a petrol depot belonging to the Azerbaijani state-run oil company SOCAR — the second time within the month that the facility had attacked.
The roots of the current crisis can be linked to the deadly crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) flight in December 2024, which Baku has blamed on Russian air defence, as well as the deaths of two ethnic Azerbaijanis during a Russian police raid in Yekaterinburg in June 2025.
Since then, there have been a series of apparent tit-for-tat arrests in both countries, a trend that continued in recent days — the pro-government media outlet APA reported earlier in August that prominent Azerbaijani businessperson Yusif Khalilov had been arrested in the city of Voronezh for allegedly trying to bribe a doctor so that his son would not be drafted into the Russian army.
Elizaveta Chukharova
