Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev received Thursday participants in the 47th meeting of the railway transport council of CIS and Baltic states.

President Ilham Aliyev highly praised the fact the meeting of the council is being held in Baku.

The President said integration processes are going successfully in the post-Soviet space, and that Azerbaijan is making efforts to contribute to the economic integration and humanitarian and transport cooperation.

“We are now strengthening and creating transport infrastructure, which includes air, rail, road and sea transport. Huge amounts of investments have been made in this sphere over the last few years. Taking into account our geographical situation and existing good infrastructure opportunities, we hope in the future Azerbaijan will play a more important role in providing transit traffic among our partner-countries – the countries with whom our historical relations have been very successfully developed. And I hope the transport component of our relations will also play very significant role in this”, Ilham Aliyev noted.

He said “as a whole, we pay huge attention to cooperation within CIS. It is not probably accidentally that we have embassies and permanent representatives in all the CIS countries without exception. We are effectively cooperating both in many-sided and bilateral formats…”

He stressed “we are intended to strengthen cooperation and mutual understanding, and to establish strong partnership relations with countries with whom we once lived together in one country. In these sixteen years of our independence, Azerbaijan has established very effective and predictable relations with our partners from CIS. This helps us in solving regional tasks, including those of economic and transport cooperation, and in general, a whole set of tasks. These tasks are almost same in all the CIS countries”.

The President said “we are making huge investments in motor, railway, sea and air transport in order to be more successful in solving tasks of economic development”

“I believe, in the future, close cooperation among members of the Council will not only contribute to economic development, but also create a good format for communication. And this factor is also important”.

Speaking on relations among CIS states, Ilham Aliyev said “we have no language barriers, we share common history and viewpoints. We have to preserve all positive so that a new generation, which is being formed in our countries, inherit the experience of friendship and cooperation from the older generation”.

President of Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin and Chairman of Board of the Latvian Railways Ugis Magonis stressed the importance of making more investments in improvement of railway infrastructure.

President of Kazakhstan`s national railway company, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, Zhaksybek Kulekeev called on the council`s member states to combine efforts in solving regional problems.