Italy-Azerbaijan strategic partnership §

Components

The partnership has four operational tracks; each has its own supporting entry in the atlas:

1. Gas supply through the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). The southern arm of the Southern Gas Corridor, completed in 2020, delivers Caspian gas from Azerbaijan via Turkey and Greece to the Italian terminal at Melendugno (Apulia). Operator data put 2024 deliveries to Italy at approximately 9.5 billion cubic metres, about 16 per cent of total Italian gas imports. This is the 2022 pivot policy as continued.
2. Energy-industrial cooperation between ENI and SOCAR. The 5 September 2024 Rome meeting between Giorgia Meloni and Ilham Aliyev at Palazzo Chigi produced three signed memoranda of understanding (Italian government press release): on energy security, on greenhouse-gas-emissions reduction, and on the biofuel production chain. SOCAR's 10 per cent stake in the Israeli Tamar gas field (June 2024) sits inside the same energy-industrial nexus.
3. Defence-aerospace cooperation led by Leonardo. In 2023 Leonardo signed a contract for the supply of C-27J Spartan medium transport aircraft to the Azerbaijani air force. Subsequent 2024–26 conversations have extended to maritime security and aerospace systems. Bloomberg coverage of the 2026 Baku visit reports that the May 2026 working agenda included "joint projects" in aerospace, maritime security and critical-infrastructure protection.
4. Connectivity and trade. Italy is Azerbaijan's largest single trading partner; bilateral turnover reached approximately USD 12 billion in 2024. A bilateral business forum has been announced for the second half of 2026 in Baku.

Politics

The partnership has been continuous across the Draghi (2021–22), Meloni (2022–) and (in office at the time of writing) successor Italian governments. It survived the 24-hour Azerbaijani operation against Nagorno-Karabakh and the resulting displacement of approximately 100,000 Armenians without measurable adjustment, in contrast to the European Parliament resolution of 5 October 2023 which described the events as ethnic cleansing. The 7 May 2026 same-day Yerevan-to-Baku visit was the iconic moment of this asymmetry: Meloni attended a European Political Community summit in Yerevan in the morning and signed energy and defence cooperation in Baku in the afternoon. editorial

Reception

Italian government messaging frames the partnership as energy-security cooperation made unavoidable by Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent rupture in Russian gas supply (Italy depended on Russia for ≈38 per cent of gas in 2021). Italian Armenian-community organisations, most Italian Armenian-allied parliamentary deputies, and several European-Parliament resolution authors describe the partnership as the substitution of one sanctioned authoritarian gas supplier (Russia) with another, unsanctioned but well-documented authoritarian one (EP resolution of 5 October 2023). Both readings are factual; they part company on what an Italian energy policy is allowed to be conditioned on. sourced opinion

The partnership has its own Italian counter-corruption record: the Milan Tribunal's 2021 conviction of Italian PACE rapporteur Luca Volontè for taking EUR 2.39 million from Azerbaijani parliamentarian Elkhan Suleymanov to whitewash the Azerbaijani human-rights record at PACE was the iconic case of the broader "caviar diplomacy" programme. The contrast between the documented bribery on one hand and the simultaneous expansion of formal state-to-state cooperation on the other is itself a fact about how the relationship works. sourced opinion