Turkey announces start date for Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway construction

The inauguration ceremony of construction on the Turkish section of the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway will be held on July 24.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul invited both his Georgian and Azerbaijani counterparts, Mikheil Saakashvili and Ilham Aliyev, to the ceremony when they met in Astana last week., the news agency Regnum reports.

The Turkish section, which will be around 70 kilometers in length, will connect Kars in northeastern Turkey to the Georgian border.

The project was hailed by Saakashvili as a “geopolitical revolution” last year at the inauguration ceremony of the Georgian section. However, it is not backed by the US and EU who are concerned at the project’s exclusion of Armenia.