The oil and gas industry has also prevailed in Russian policy towards the Caspian Sea.
The small country, north of Iran on the Caspian Sea, is home to the Azerbaijan International Oil Consortium.
The former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan is celebrating the first flow of oil from the Caspian Sea for decades.
The Chamber of Commerce member, Mohamad Reza Najafi Manesh, had just returned from his villa, on the Caspian Sea.
In 1990, about 50, 000 were killed in a quake near the Caspian Sea.
Oil is piped from the Caspian Sea to ports in the Black Sea, increasing Russia's anxiety to maintain control.
But that would require building beneath the Caspian Sea, which Russia would veto.
It flew only a few feet above the water and was a familiar Cold War sight flying over the Caspian Sea.
It sits astride a Russian pipeline running from the oilfields of the Caspian Sea to the ports of the Black Sea.
Mr Eizenstat was giving testimony to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing investigating the Caspian Sea area and US policy towards it.
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence learned that some al Qaeda operatives were living in the northern Iranian town of Chalus, on the Caspian Sea.
Kazakhstan has extended a state of emergency in the Caspian Sea town of Zhanaozen, where oil workers have been protesting for months.
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The northern part of the Caspian Sea is extremely shallow, with depths of only two to nine metres (seven to 30 feet).
Back in the 1920s, the Petrossian brothers, refugees from the Russian Revolution, had two problems in trying to introduce Caspian Sea caviar to skeptical Parisians.
Azerbaijan, for its part, has pointedly denied Iran entry into the consortium of countries invited to develop oil in the Caspian Sea.
But since the break-up of the Soviet Union, it's been eyeing a potential new source of oil and gas -- the Caspian Sea.
About 20 birds have already died of hunger after the Caspian Sea froze over, local government spokesman Arslan Dydymov told the Associated Press.
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Local environmentalists blame an international oil consortium now drilling its first well in the shallow waters of Kazakhstan's sector of the Caspian Sea.
The rivalry between this and Europe's alternative plan - the Nabucco pipeline - is one of the most intense in the Caspian Sea region.
Washington has a strong interest in stability in the Caspian Sea nation, which sits at a strategically vital point between Iran, Russia and Turkey.
Last year, however, a consortium led by BP opened a huge pipeline between Baku, on the Caspian Sea, and the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), a venture involving Western corporations along with Kazakstan, Russia and Oman, will carry oil west, north of the Caspian Sea.
Monument Oil and Gas was among the first western firms to strike a deal in Turkmenistan, one of the energy-rich countries surrounding the Caspian Sea.
Such efforts appear to be paying dividends, not the least of which is with respect to controlling the strategically sensitive Caspian Sea's immense oil reserves.
At about the time the American sturgeon catch was starting to tap out, fish eggs from the Caspian Sea were beginning to put on their cosmopolitan French airs.
They were shot on their way to morning prayers, close to the imam's home in the Caspian Sea town of Derbent, law enforcement sources told reporters.
The deal, expected to be signed in April, would involve drilling rights and oil refining in Siberia and possibly near the Caspian Sea and on Sakhalin Island.
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The overnight train from Baku to the southern border town of Astara leaves at 11pm and makes its way slowly south, along the coast of the Caspian Sea.
Another factor has been the discovery of oil in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea last summer, where the Offshore Kazakhstan International Operating Company has been drilling.
The Tengiz problem is a mere puddle next to the troubles at Kashagan in the remote North Caspian Sea, the world's largest oilfield discovery in the last three decades.
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