The Turkish and Azerbaijani presidents came together today in Samarkand, the historic Silk Road city in Uzbekistan that is hosting a two-day summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), amid renewed hostilities between Baku and Yerevan. 

The meeting between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, which lasted 40 minutes, comes ahead of Erdogan’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the second day of the summit. Besides the Armenia-Azerbaijan flare-up, efforts to enhance the grain corridor in the Black Sea are expected to top the agenda of the Putin-Erdogan meeting.  

Putin expressed his woes on the grain deal last week, which Erdogan helped broker in July. Under the deal, Ukraine was allowed to export 5 million tons of grain per month, thus easing fears of a global food crisis. To secure the exports, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish and UN officials set up an operational center in Istanbul to help guide commercial ships from Ukraine through minefields in the Black Sea. The Turkish Defense Ministry announced today that more than 3 million tons had reached global markets in the last 46 days. 

Putin, saying that the grain was not reaching the developing world, threatened to pull out of the deal last week. Russian officials also complained that parts of the agreement that were intended to help Russia sell its fertilizer and other agricultural products amid sanctions didn’t have much effect.