Ilham Aliyev put it flatly. No two countries on earth are as close as Türkiye and Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan's president said that Monday at the fourth Shusha Global Media Forum, answering a question from Anadolu Ajansı editor-in-chief Yusuf Özhan. Weigh politics, economy, energy, connectivity, and the ties between ordinary people, Aliyev said, and no other pair of nations matches Ankara and Baku. Together, he added, they are far stronger than apart.
Then he went past brotherhood. "We are not only brothers and friends; we are allies," he said. He tied that word to the Shusha Declaration he signed with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on 15 June 2021, in the same Karabakh city, which he said lifted the relationship "to the level of alliance."
Aliyev said what alliance means to him in plain terms. If something bad befalls one of the two countries, he told the forum, the other will stand with it using every capacity it has, military included, to defend its brother. That line came in Turkish, and it is the mutual-defense promise both capitals fold into the phrase they reach for most: "one nation, two states."
He also made a point that carries weight coming from this region. Shared language or religion guarantees nothing. Peoples who speak nearly the same tongue have gone to war, he noted, and people of the same faith have killed each other. So the Türkiye–Azerbaijan bond, he argued, is "a model" that neighbors should study and copy. "The neighbors should behave exactly as Türkiye and Azerbaijan."
The forum remarks landed days after that alliance showed its harder edge.
On Thursday, Azerbaijani Defense Minister Zakir Hasanov met in Baku with a delegation led by Selçuk Bayraktar, board chairman of Baykar, the Turkish firm behind the Bayraktar TB2 and the jet-powered Kızılelma drone. The two sides discussed widening joint production, according to a statement from Azerbaijan's defense ministry. Hasanov called the countries "fraternal," said their military cooperation keeps advancing alongside everything else, and pushed for deeper co-production built on newer technology. Türkiye's ambassador to Azerbaijan, Birol Akgün, sat in.
The talks ran through unmanned aerial vehicles, electronic warfare, and unmanned systems, the ministry said. Bayraktar thanked his hosts and said the back-and-forth visits strengthen the military and military-technical ties between the two countries.
Aliyev received Bayraktar the same day. On X, Bayraktar wrote that he briefed the president on the projects Bayraktar Technologies is running inside Azerbaijan, and closed with a line that could stand as the week's theme: "May our unity and brotherhood with dear Azerbaijan endure forever."
Baykar's drones are woven into that brotherhood. TB2s flew for Azerbaijan in the 2020 Karabakh war, and Shusha, where Aliyev spoke Monday, sits in the territory Baku retook that autumn before restoring full control of the region in 2023.
Aliyev turned last to trade, casting Azerbaijan as a transit hub whose cargo traffic has climbed as the Middle East reroutes freight. Baku is raising its main Caspian port from 15 million to 25 million tons of annual capacity and building 10 new ships. Drones and declarations carry the alliance in the headlines. The ports carry it in the ledgers, and both capitals count that as the same word.