Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited June 15 a key town in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, which was recaptured by Azerbaijani forces with Turkey’s help in a short but decisive war last fall that saw much of the disputed enclave return to Azerbaijani control.

The fall of Shusha — or Shushi as it is called in Armenian — was a defining moment in the conflict that has seen the alliance between Turkey and its ethnic Azerbaijani cousins grow even stronger, but also led to the deployment of Russian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh for the first time in the wake of a Russian-brokered cease-fire that ended the war.

During their tour of Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority Armenian enclave ceded to Azerbaijan under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, then wrested by Armenia in a previous war in the 1990s, Erdogan and his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, signed the “Shusa Declaration” whereby they pledged to rush to the other’s defense in the event one was attacked by a third country.

The love fest between the two leaders will have come as balm to Erdogan following his meeting with US President Joe Biden on the margins of the NATO summit in Brussels June 14 — the first since the latter became president. The meeting did little to ease ongoing tensions between the two NATO allies over Turkey’s refusal to relinquish possession of Russian S-400 missiles it bought despite Washington’s threat of sanctions that it later followed through.