The Kremlin website announced that a “phone conversation took place” between the two leaders.
It became clear from a similar announcement on the Azerbaijani president’s website that the initiator of the call was indeed V. Putin. It states: “The President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin called the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.”
It is noteworthy that both announcements formulate the topics of the conversation almost identically. Both publications state that V. Putin and I. Aliyev discussed bilateral relations, “emphasized the constructive nature of Russia-Azerbaijan relations and the intensified dialogue at the level of governments and responsible institutions,” and also confirmed the intention to “further expand mutually beneficial cooperation.”
The initiator of the call was also omitted by the Russian state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti. V. Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov, commenting on the conversation to journalists, used a vague formulation: “The President held a phone conversation.”
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The call after Aliyev’s joke
V. Putin called I. Aliyev two weeks after the Azerbaijani president spoke at the Shusha forum and joked there about repression in Russia.
He recalled the story with Kremlin political scientist Sergey Markov, who was recognized as a “foreign agent” a month after speaking positively about I. Aliyev. The Azerbaijani president doubted whether the political scientist had not yet been arrested.
