Erdoğan to meet Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev in Nakhchivan on Monday

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will meet his counterpart Ilham Aliyev in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan on Monday, Turkish media reported on Sunday.

The two allies had said in June they wanted to step up efforts to open a land corridor linking Türkiye to Azerbaijan's main territory via Nakhchivan and Armenia, a longstanding and complex project.

Erdoğan and Aliyev will discuss bilateral relations, as well as regional and global issues, particularly the recent developments in Karabakh, Türkiye's Communications Directorate said on Sunday.

The leaders are expected to attend the groundbreaking ceremony of the Igdir-Nakhchivan natural gas pipeline and inaugurate the modernized Nakhchivan military complex.

Ankara and Baku agreed in 2020 to supply natural gas from Türkiye to Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic in a memorandum of understanding.

The new 85-kilometer-long gas pipeline will run from Türkiye's eastern province of Igdir to Sederek in western Azerbaijan, with an annual capacity of 500 million cubic meters (mcm) and 1.5 mcm daily.

The project will be realized through a partnership between Türkiye's crude oil and natural gas pipeline trading company BOTAS and Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR.