There is a particular kind of diplomatic choreography that gives away more than the speeches do. It must have raised questions as to who was courting whom when Ursula von der Leyen, Antonio Costa, and Kaja Kallas visited Baku over a period of ten months – the president of the European Commission, the president of the European Council, and the European Union’s chief foreign policy official, respectively – all making a beeline to a nation of ten million on the western shores of the Caspian Sea.

The official framing, delivered by the EU's newly appointed ambassador to Azerbaijan, Marijana Kujundžić, at a roundtable in Baku last week, was suitably diplomatic. "We are entering a new phase of our relations," she said. "They have intensified." Negotiations on a new bilateral agreement, stalled for years, are set to resume at the end of September. The EU, she noted, remains Azerbaijan's largest trading partner, three decades after the two sides signed their first partnership agreement in 1996.

All true, and all beside the more interesting point. There is definitely an 'unevenness' in the traffic of visitors between Brussels and Baku. Azerbaijani delegations visiting Brussels consist mostly of ministers, like Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeyhun Bayramov and Minister of Energy Parviz Shahbazov, whereas President Ilham Aliyev has not set foot in Brussels in years. Perhaps it is the only possible proof of which of the two parties needs the other. The reason is not hard to find, I assume.

With the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the urgent attempts by Europe to disengage itself from Russian gas supplies, Azerbaijan........

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