Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan have been rapidly strengthening their relations. On June 1, Uzbekistan’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Bahrom Ashrafkhanov, told reporters that relations between the two countries are “experiencing an unprecedented, highest stage of development … across all areas”.
This comes following numerous meetings and agreements between the two countries over the past year. In November 2025, Azerbaijan’s formal admission as a full member in the Consultative Meetings of the Heads of State of Central Asia signified the establishment of a more extensive geopolitical and geo-economic space linking Central Asia and the South Caucasus through political coordination, trade, energy, and transport. Within this evolving framework, the Azerbaijan-Uzbekistan partnership has attracted particular strategic significance.
Despite Kazakhstan remaining Azerbaijan’s most immediate and visible partner in Caspian connectivity, Uzbekistan has emerged as one of Baku’s principal political partners in shaping the rationale and future direction of the wider C6 format.
At the seventh Consultative Meeting of Central Asian leaders in Tashkent on November 16, 2025, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev described the decision to include Azerbaijan as “historic” and declared that it would contribute to the construction of a “solid bridge” between Central Asia and the South Caucasus. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev underscored that active regional interaction had already rendered Central Asia and Azerbaijan “a single geopolitical and geo-economic region”. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev equally endorsed Azerbaijan’s inclusion as a landmark decision, reinforcing the unanimous political will behind it.
The C6 format consolidates Azerbaijan’s position as a bridge between Central Asia and the South Caucasus, and Uzbekistan’s role is particularly instructive in understanding the logic at work. Azerbaijan’s inclusion provides Uzbekistan with a western outlet for its regional strategy, through Azerbaijan’s ports, railways, and location on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. This makes the relationship function as one of the political pillars of the burgeoning C6 framework.
A pattern of increasingly intensive high-level political dialogue has facilitated the rapid development of the bilateral relationship in recent years. The 2024 Agreement on Allied Relations, the 2022 Declaration on Deepening Strategic Partnership and Expanding Comprehensive Cooperation, and the 2004 Declaration on Further Strengthening Strategic Partnership are documents in the legal framework of relations with Uzbekistan, according to the Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The political momentum has been further bolstered by frequent presidential contacts, such as Mirziyoyev’s five visits to Azerbaijan over the course of a year and a half, as well as numerous meetings between Mirziyoyev and Aliyev at international venues. The relationship was strengthened by the Allied Relations Treaty, signed in Tashkent on August 23, 2024. In May 2025, Uzbekistan ratified the treaty, thereby ensuring that the partnership had transitioned from diplomatic warmth to institutionalized strategic alignment.
This momentum continued throughout 2025. On July 2, 2025, Mirziyoyev and Azerbaijani officials exchanged a package of documents that encompassed trade, industrial cooperation, customs, education, environmental protection, social protection, and regional partnerships. A program of industrial cooperation for 2025-2027 and an action plan to boost bilateral trade turnover to $1 billion by 2030 were among the most critical documents. These documents demonstrate that Baku and Tashkent are endeavoring to provide economic substance to their political reconciliation.
The same trend is evident in the trade figures, even though the absolute volume remains modest compared with trade between the two countries and with their larger external partners. In 2024, bilateral trade increased from $32.4 million in 2017 to $253.5 million, as reported by Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Investment, Industry, and Trade. Compared to the same period of the previous year, trade turnover increased by 25.2 percent in the first five months of 2025, reaching $90.5 million. In an interview with the Uzbekistan National News Agency, Aliyev shared that trade totaled $319 million from January to September 2025, representing an 87.5 percent increase from the previous year.
The energy dimension has added a qualitatively new layer to the partnership. On July 24, 2025, the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), Uzbekneftegaz, and Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Energy signed a Production Sharing Agreement covering exploration and potential hydrocarbon production in the Ustyurt region. The project is estimated to require around $2 billion in investment. SOCAR operates the project and has begun seismic surveys covering over 3,000 linear kilometers (1,864 miles). In a significant expansion of the consortium, BP acquired a 40 percent participating interest on May 13, bringing the ownership structure to BP 40 percent, SOCAR 30 percent, and Uzbekneftegaz 30 percent, and marking BP’s first entry into Uzbekistan’s upstream sector. The energy alignment extends beyond hydrocarbons. On July 2, 2025, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan registered a joint venture-the Green Corridor Alliance, with Azerenerji as a founding shareholder-designed to export renewable energy from Central Asia to Europe via high-voltage transmission infrastructure and a Black Sea interconnector.
The transport and connectivity dimension remains central to the C6 framework’s practical logic. Azerbaijan’s Baku International Sea Trade Port at Alat is a key node. Between January and November 2025, container turnover there reached 96,952 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU)-a 40.8 percent increase from the same period of 2024-while Azerbaijan Railways handled 350 block trains from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) via Central Asia, up 34 percent year-on-year. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway completed the upgrade of its Georgian segment in 2025, considerably increasing line capacity, and a new multimodal terminal was inaugurated in Poti, Georgia, in June 2025. Container traffic through the Middle Corridor as a whole reached 76,900 TEU in 2025, a 36 percent increase over 2024, driven in part by Red Sea disruptions and the EU ban on cargo transit through Russia. Both Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan have publicly endorsed the logic of connecting the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway-whose construction commenced in December 2024-to the Middle Corridor to create a multi-route Eurasian transit system. The operationalization of the CKU railway will strengthen Uzbekistan’s position as a critical hub between the PRC and the Caspian, while Azerbaijan’s Alat infrastructure serves as the natural western terminus.
The broader connectivity picture also encompasses the prospective Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) (previously referred to as the Zangezur Corridor), linking mainland Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave through Armenia’s Syunik province and onward to Türkiye. The route’s implementation would further enhance the Middle Corridor’s flexibility and confer competitive advantages on the entire C6 connectivity system. The European Union’s Global Gateway initiative has committed 12 billion euros ($14 billion) for Central Asia, announced at the first EU-Central Asia Summit in Samarkand in April 2025, with around 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) earmarked for Middle Corridor transport connections-investment flows in which Azerbaijan’s role as western gateway makes it a structural beneficiary.
Both Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan have fostered collaboration within the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) in energy, digitalization, trade, transport, and cultural-humanitarian relations. The newly established C6 framework follows a different institutional logic than that of Turkic cooperation. It unites all Central Asian states, including the non-Turkic Tajikistan, while facilitating Azerbaijan’s participation through shared connectivity, economic, and strategic interests. The Azerbaijan-Uzbekistan partnership has emerged as an indicator of the C6 format’s potential direction. This is seen in the rapid growth of bilateral relations and the way they interconnect overlapping agendas, including Turkic cooperation, Central Asian institutionalization, and broader Eurasian trade diversification. For Baku, the relationship with Tashkent reinforces its positioning as the South Caucasus anchor of Central Asia’s westward connectivity. For Tashkent, Azerbaijan provides access to the Caspian Sea, Türkiye, and European markets while offering investment and energy partnerships with global reach.
