By empty (7/11/2006 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Azerbaijan\'s president is expected to attend the unveiling of a new pipeline linking the Caspian Sea to Turkish ports for oil transport. Azeri President Ilham Aliyev will head to Istanbul this week to join a delegation from Azerbaijan as well as Georgia and Turkey, including their presidents, Turan News Agency reported. All will attend a ceremony July 12 marking the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, or BTC, oil pipeline.

By empty (7/11/2006 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev told the Turkish daily \"Cumhuriyet\" in an interview published on July 10 that he has no plans to meet with his Armenian counterpart Robert Kocharian on the sidelines of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg on July 15-17, RFE/RL\'s Armenian Service reported. Aliyev noted that he and Kocharian have met twice in recent months (in February on the outskirts of Paris and in June in Bucharest) but, due to what he termed the \"unconstructive position\" adopted by Armenia, those meetings \"did not yield any results\" in terms of further progress towards resolving the Karabakh conflict.

By empty (7/11/2006 issue of the CACI Analyst)

The Russian authorities have no intention of overly dramatizing Georgia\'s decision to close down a checkpoint in the village of Ergneti, the Russian Foreign Ministry\'s Ambassador at Large Yury Popov told Interfax on Tuesday. \"We hope that all problems will be sorted out as part of dialogue. We see no grounds to overly dramatize the situation,\" he said.