BAKU (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th April, 2019) Azerbaijan is interested in holding trilateral talks with Iran and Russia in order to agree on economic preferences of the International North-South Transport Corridor, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said.
Earlier in the day, the Azerbaijani foreign minister said that Baku had received an official note on the meeting of the presidents of Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia, adding that it might take place in Russia in August.
"The trilateral format of Baku - Moscow - Tehran is a good initiative. The first meeting was held in Baku, then there was a meeting in Tehran. This was a meeting of the presidents who are building a corridor all the way up to St. Petersburg. In this case, everyone is interested in it having an effect. Yes, there are questions that need to be answered since the corridor is mainly tuned to Indian goods and South China goods. All this is a topic of conversation. The economy is such that if you build preferences, any corridor can get off the ground," Mammadyarov told reporters.
The International North-South Transport Corridor is a network of efficient transportation routes by rail, land, and sea which span from South-East Asia to Northern Europe through India, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Russia. Iran's city of Astara was connected with Azerbaijan's eponymous city in 2018.
In 2016, the energy ministers of Russia, Armenia, Georgia and Iran signed a road map of the project. It is expected that the transport corridor will have the capacity of up to 20 million tonnes of cargo annually.
