Heads of state of the Turkic-speaking countries — Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — opened a two-day summit in Istanbul on 18 October, Western news agencies reported; some Turkish sources were of the opinion that the gathering would reaffirm cultural and economic ties but would be short on substance.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman told Reuters that Turkey saw the summit as a demonstration of Turkey's special relationship with the new Turkic states. Uzbek President Islam Karimov told journalists before his departure for the summit that he hoped the gathering would further the economic and cultural integration of the Turkic-speaking world, but noted that many of the documents signed at the previous Turkic summit in 1992 had remained on paper.

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October 20, 1994 - A summit of the heads of state of the Turkic-speaking countries — Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — ended on 19 October in Istanbul with an appeal for closer political, cultural, and economic cooperation, including support for plans to build gas and oil pipelines from Central Asia to Europe via Turkey, Western and Turkish news agencies reported.

At a press conference after the summit ended, Turkish President Suleyman Demirel took exception to a Russian Foreign Ministry warning to participants on the eve of the summit not to engage in pan-Turkic rhetoric. Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbaev said that cooperation among the Turkic states would not conflict with his Eurasian Union scheme, and Turkmen leader Saparmurad Niyazov was quoted as saying that summit decisions did not supersede CIS obligations.