Baku's foreign ministry summoned Ambassador Mikhail Yevdokimov on 6 July over a strike the evening before on a SOCAR filling station in Ukraine's Mykolaiv region, and said it was not the first. It listed earlier hits on SOCAR's oil depot and compressor station in Odesa, and damage to the Azerbaijani embassy in Kyiv and the consulate in Kharkiv. Russia has been striking Ukrainian filling stations in return for Kyiv's campaign against Russian refineries, which is the same campaign now squeezing fuel across Central Asia.
The rupture is more than a year old. It began when Russian air defence downed an Azerbaijani airliner in December 2024, a plane that crashed near Aktau in Kazakhstan and killed 38, and it deepened with the 2025 detention and alleged torture of ethnic Azerbaijanis in Yekaterinburg. Moscow acknowledged the plane in October and paid compensation in April. The SOCAR strikes show the friction did not close with the cheque. Days earlier, the Azerbaijani city of Shusha hosted a conference on Russia's colonial record, with delegates from a dozen states. No Central Asian republic sent one.
That empty chair is the story for us. Azerbaijan is the hinge of Central Asia's escape from Russian territory. The Middle Corridor runs from China across Central Asia, over the Caspian, and through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Türkiye to Europe. Kazakhstan is pushing container volumes along it, Uzbekistan is turning toward the Black Sea, and Turkmenistan's Caspian coast gives Ashgabat a stake too. Every one of those routes passes through Baku, and a Baku tangled with Moscow is a reminder that the alternative to Russian transit still runs through contested ground.
The alternative to Russian transit still runs through contested ground.
The region wants the exit, and the money behind it. The European Union has floated up to €2 billion to link Europe and Central Asia through the Black Sea and the South Caucasus, and Washington has invited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, alongside Azerbaijan, to the G20 in December. What these governments will not do is sign on to an openly anti-Russian line. Labour migration, security ties and energy links still draw the boundary, and their absence from Shusha traced it exactly.
Watch whether Moscow answers the protest or lets it lie, since escalation would threaten its own rail transit through Azerbaijan to Armenia. Watch whether the strikes push Baku deeper into the European and American corridor plans. And watch whether any Central Asian capital edges from quiet hedging toward the posture Baku has taken. Baku has chosen to make noise; Central Asia will keep hedging in near-silence. Both are edging the same way, toward the exits, and away from Moscow's hold on their trade.