Based on a news article of today from which excerpts are posted below. The GUAM acronym is formed from the first letters of the countries that it includes: Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. Background information: GUAM: U.S., NATO Applaud Eastern Partnership Drive Into Former Soviet Space. GUAM (in 2007 formally named the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development) was established in 1997 in Strasbourg under the guidance of the Clinton administration and the European Union.

It was designed to weaken the Commonwealth of Independent States (none of the four nations involved were members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, however) to serve as a multi-purpose transport corridor – the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, the Baku–Tbilisi–Erzurum natural gas pipeline and the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway (note the role of Turkey in all three) being early components – to bring oil and gas from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea and thence to Europe and conversely NATO military expansion from Europe to the Caspian Sea.

Over a decade ago former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and ambassador to Azerbaijan Matthew Bryza acknowledged that the transportation corridor the U.S. and its Western allies developed in the late 1990s to ship energy to the west was used to transport troops and equipment to the east starting with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

The European Union has been grooming Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine for accession as a group with association agreements under Eastern Partnership auspices. The three nations of late have been mentioned jointly on a regular basis by NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and others as instances of alleged Russian aggression and occupation, alluding to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Crimea, respectively.

In addition to the common energy and military trajectories the U.S., NATO and EU have charted out for the four nations, they are also united in being the only post-Soviet states that have unresolved territorial disputes, as above, and Russian military forces on land they claim as their own.

Until recently the situations with Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh (which Azerbaijan claims), South Ossetia and Transnistria were referred to as frozen conflicts. Those entities (except for Nagorno-Karabakh) are now referred to by the U.S. and NATO as occupied territories. Since 2014 Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk have been added to the list.

The Ukrainian defense/war minister who replaced his hastily-sacked predecessor in November, Oleksiy Reznikov, came to that role directly from being Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine.

The “temporarily occupied territories” mentioned above are what prevent Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine immediately joining NATO. (Georgia’s and Ukraine’s fellow NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners Finland and Sweden, now regularly grouped with Georgia and Ukraine as future members of the military alliance by NATO and U.S. officials, have no such roadblocks.)

The West is poised to launch its final offensive in what this site has referred to as the war of Soviet succession. The GUAM nexus is the battleground.

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Zelensky: Kyiv, Baku will work on creation of transport corridor, possibly within GUAM

See also: Nagorno-Karabakh model for Crimea, Donbass: Azerbaijan, Ukraine deepen strategic partnership

Ukraine and Azerbaijan will work to create a transport corridor, possibly within GUAM, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

“We will continue to work on a number of prospects. Among other things, this is the creation of a transport corridor, possibly within GUAM, which unites Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova,” Zelensky said at a joint press conference with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Kyiv on Friday.

According to him, the current discourse is the development of transit potential and the creation of an appropriate modern infrastructure.

“We must step up cooperation in the field of international road and rail transport, as well as in the aviation industry,” Zelensky said.