Belgrade, November 23, AZERTAC

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has held an expanded meeting with President of the Republic of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic.

Welcoming the President of Azerbaijan, President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic said:

- Dear Mr. President,

Dear friends.

Thank you for coming to Serbia. We are very glad to see you here today in Belgrade. We will be able to seeing you more often in our country, as well as we hope we will be visiting your country. And thank you Mr. President, we know that you are very busy these days. I might say the same thing myself that you are more productive. We are best friends. I know how difficult it is for you to schedule a visit to our country. Thank you for coming here. I believe that we confirmed during our tete-a-tete meeting the real friendship between our two countries. We will always be supportive to territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, as well as you have always been very supportive under not always very easy circumstances to territorial integrity and sovereignty of Serbia. We will keep doing the same and I know that under your leadership Azerbaijan will always do the same. We congratulate you on many successes you made in the recent period, and your economic successes are something that everybody is taking the look on and we see the real prosperous country becoming even a bigger friend, and a bigger ally for our country. Thank you once again for coming, and I hope that we will have more time to discuss it when I come to Baku and when you come back to Serbia.

x x x

Addressing the event, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said:

- Thank you Mr. President. First of all thank you for the invitation. I am very glad to see you again. Thank you for your hospitality. We just had a very good and productive bilateral discussion tete-a-tete and now we will continue our communication. As you correctly mentioned, Serbia and Azerbaijan always supported each other on international arena and the issues related to territorial integrity and sovereignty of our countries, always were addressed with respect to interests of both countries. This is natural, because our countries are strategic partners. We signed corresponding documents elevating our cooperation. At the same time the substance of our cooperation is also very friendly. A lot of things we will discuss today and taking this opportunity, I would like to invite you to visit Azerbaijan. We met many times during the last couple of years, since your official visit to Azerbaijan on the sidelines of international events always had an opportunity to talk to each other. I am grateful for this invitation. I am very glad to be back to beautiful country of Serbia, our friendly country and to contribute together with you and members of our delegations to the future development of our strategic partnership. So, once again, thank you, and we will be waiting for your visit to Azerbaijan.