Turkmen leader Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow arrived in Azerbaijan on 16 July, where he held meetings with President Ilham Aliyev and toured various places around the country, including Nagorno-Karabakh.
Berdimuhamedow currently serves as the Chair of the People’s Council of Turkmenistan, but was previously president until 2022. Currently, his son Serdar Berdimuhamedow is the president, but the two hold a power-sharing agreement and Gurbunguly Berdimuhamedow is widely believed to be the de-facto leader of the country.
In an Azerbaijani official readout of their meeting, Aliyev said, ‘I am confident that [Berdimuhamedow’s] visit will make a significant contribution to the development of the brotherly relations between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Our peoples are bound together by deep-rooted fraternal traditions, which have grown even stronger during the years of independence’.
The sentiment was echoed by Berdimuhamedow, who said, ‘In general, if we were to characterise the current level of Turkmen–Azerbaijani interstate relations, I would define them in three words: brotherhood, good neighbourliness, and cooperation’.
The state-run media agency Turkmenistan Today also issued a lengthy statement full of platitudes and diplomatic niceties.
In addition to an official meeting and dinner, the two leaders visited a number of places around the country, including the Sea Breeze resort on the Caspian Sea and several sights in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
