2002 and the Istanbul Summit, 2004 among the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia in an attempt to resolve the ongoing conflict, but its diplomatic efforts are hampered by its own tensions with Armenia over the claim of Armenian genocide and its ongoing border blockade against Armenia, which has resulted in subsequent infrastructure projects bypassing Armenian territory. Azerbaijan and Turkey have subsequently built upon their linguistic and cultural ties to form a very close economic partnership that sees Turkey negotiating to buy natural gas from Azerbaijan and the two co-operating, along with neighbouring Georgia, in such infrastructure projects as the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, the South Caucasus Pipeline, Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railway and the proposed Trans-Anatolian gas pipeline all of which bypassing Armenia despite a recent thawing in diplomatic relations between Ankara and Yerevan, which make them key players in European energy security. As BBC correspondent Chris Morris states, in The New Turkey (Granta Books, 2005), "Turkey lacks the great natural resources of the industrial age – oil and gas – and it has to import nearly all its energy supplies. But its proximity to Azerbaijan, the Caspian, and Central Asia, as well as to the Middle East, has allowed it to cultivate a new strategic role: the ‘missing link’ in a chain connecting these new producers of vast mineral resources with the consumer societies in Europe, America and beyond." İlham Aliyev visited Turkey in 2003 shortly after first entering the Azerbaijani political scene at the behest of his ailing father Heydar Aliyev in a move that was interpreted at the time as an indication of political support from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. STAR The opening of the STAR oil refinery, owned by the Azerbaijani State Oil Company SOCAR, was held in the Turkish city of Izmir on October 19, 2018. The foundation of STAR was laid on October 25, 2011, with the participation of Azerbaijani and Turkish Presidents Ilham Aliyev and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The consortium consisting of Técnicas Reunidas (Spain), Saipem (Italy), GS Engineering & Construction Corp (South Korea) and Itochu (Japan) built the plant. TANAP The TANAP project was envisaged on November 17, 2011, at the Third Black Sea Energy and Economic Forum in Istanbul. The Memorandum of Understanding was signed between Azerbaijan and Turkey on the Trans Anatolian Gas Pipeline Project on December 24, 2011, in order to establish a consortium of the project with