Azerbaijan’s president has confirmed that former senior German and Russian officials met secretly in Baku this month to weigh ways of ending Russia’s war against Ukraine – and said his own government knew nothing about it.
“Our territory was used for such a meeting without our knowledge,” Ilham Aliyev said alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin on Tuesday, adding that flight records placed the talks between July 12 and 14.
The German side, according to Bloomberg, included Ronald Pofalla, once Angela Merkel’s chief of staff, and Matthias Platzeck, a former SPD leader and premier of Brandenburg. On the Russian side were Valery Fadeyev, who heads the Kremlin’s human-rights council, and Viktor Zubkov, a former prime minister who now chairs Gazprom’s board.
Merz said his government had no knowledge of the meeting – a distinction that matters, since those in the room were former officials, not an authorised negotiating team.
Still, the channel signals Europe’s growing appetite to shape any settlement. The US-led track run by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner stalled as Washington’s attention shifted to Iran, while the European Union has said it is ready to step up its diplomacy.
The Baku channel was no formal mediation. But it fits Ilham Aliyev’s careful straddle: he has backed Ukraine – most recently signing cooperation deals with Kyiv – while keeping his lines to Moscow open, even after Baku blamed Russian air defences for the 2024 downing of an Azerbaijani airliner. That a Russian delegation could still meet quietly on Azerbaijani soil underlines the point – German political networks are already probing contact with Moscow, and neither Baku nor Europe means to sit out a settlement if talks resume.
