BATUMI - Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev pledged support on Tuesday for a Ukrainian pipeline project to ship Caspian Sea oil to Europe.
Speaking after a meeting with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, Aliyev said the three countries hoped to further energy cooperation.
"We have jointly implemented major energy projects which completely changed the political situation in the region," he told journalists. "We now have a new project, the Odessa-Brody-Gdansk plan. The Caspian, Black Sea and Baltic regions are united in ensuring energy security."
Ukraine is promoting a plan to use a 670-kilometre (418-mile) pipeline built in 2001 to pump Caspian oil from its Black Sea port of Odessa to Brody, a town close to the Polish border, and eventually expand the pipeline to the Polish city of Gdansk.
Azerbaijan and Georgia have already cooperated to build the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey, which circumvents Russia to deliver Caspian oil to Western markets.
The three presidents met in Georgia`s Black Sea city of Batumi for a summit of the GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova) group of former Soviet states, which is seen as a pro-Western counterweight to the Kremlin-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Moldova has distanced itself from the organisation in recent years and sent Interior Minister Valentin Mejinschi as its representative at the summit.
Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus and Polish President Lech Kaczynski also took part as observers.
Saakashvili told journalists the group shared a common goal of building stronger ties with Europe.
"We are united by our desire to make our final choice with Europe," he said.
The GUAM group was launched in 1997 but Georgia and Ukraine have recently sought to expand its activity and raise its profile amid deteriorating relations with Moscow.
im-mm/ag
07/01/2008 20:42 GMT