Mr Aliyev said Azerbaijan was also interested in diversifying its oil export routes. "Looking at new export routes interests us," Aliyev is reported as saying after the talks. The Azerbaijani leader said oil would be flowing through the US-backed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline at full capacity by 2008 along the route that was also designed to skirt Russia and deliver Caspian crude to world markets, while supplies from the region would continue to grow. The Odessa-Brody project would entail shipping Azerbaijani hydrocarbons from the Caspian to the Black Sea, across Ukraine and then north to Poland's Baltic Sea coast and on to world markets. The pipeline was initially built in 2002 to reduce Ukraine's dependence on Russia for oil. But when Ukraine failed to finalize the necessary oil supply deals with other countries it agreed – in 2004 – to allow Russian oil to be transported through the pipeline in the opposite direction. Mr Yushchenko said Ukraine's state oil monopoly Ukrnafta had asked Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR to supply as much as 5 m tons/yr of oil for the pipeline. "Ukrnafta officials have asked SOCAR to formalize a schedule for shipments. We're talking about 4.5 to 5.0m tons of oil and 600,000 tons of 'technical' oil to fill the pipeline," he said. It was reported earlier that Mr Yushchenko's visit to Azerbaijan was part of his efforts to relax Russian dominance over the ex-Soviet Union states. Ukraine, in particular, is keen to escape from what it sees as Moscow's energy stranglehold following the punitive dispute over natural gas prices last January.