Meloni same-day Yerevan to Baku visit
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attended the European Political Community summit in Yerevan in the morning of 7 May 2026 and flew the same day to Baku to meet Ilham Aliyev and "deepen the strategic partnership".
Account
The trip crystallised the contradiction at the heart of Italian Caucasus policy: support for Armenia in EU-aligned diplomacy alongside an expanding strategic partnership with the Aliyev regime that had ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and remained under European Parliament criticism. Italian state messaging framed the Baku visit as energy-security cooperation; Italian Armenian-community organisations and Armenian-allied EP deputies framed it as a substitution of one sanctioned authoritarian gas supplier (Russia) with another, unsanctioned one. editorial