Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan is a Caspian state of about 10 million people with its capital at Baku. Independent from the Soviet Union since 1991, it has built its economy and Foreign Policy on the Shah Deniz gas field and Caspian oil, managed by the state company SOCAR. President Ilham Aliyev, in office since 2003, runs a multi-vector Foreign Policy that keeps ties open with Russia, the EU, Turkey and Iran at once.

Its route to Europe is the Southern Gas Corridor: the South Caucasus Pipeline to Turkey, the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline across it, and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline through Greece and Albania to Italy, with a planned expansion that could take TAP towards 20 bcm a year. The EU signed up for more Azerbaijani gas from 2022 as it cut Russian supply. Within Turkey, BOTAS takes Azerbaijani volumes under long-term contracts with SOCAR and mixes them with Russian and Iranian gas before selling the blend to the EU as Turkish.

That makes Azerbaijan's value to Europe and the blending gap the same route: Azerbaijani volumes are the cover under which Russian molecules can cross at Kipi. When the EU ban on Russian pipeline gas took effect on 17 June 2026, BOTAS was still selling the blend at Kipi with no proof of origin.