President Donald Trump signed a joint peace declaration with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia aimed at ending decades of war and reached pacts giving the US exclusive rights to develop a transit route through the South Caucasus.
“With this accord, we’ve finally succeeded in making peace,” Trump said in the White House meeting Friday.
US officials portrayed the agreements as a win for Washington and a setback for Russia, Iran and China. While the peace declaration doesn’t carry the legal force of a treaty, all the leaders expressed confidence its terms would hold.
The two former Soviet neighbors have been in conflict since the waning years of the USSR, when Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan. Tensions spiraled into wars that killed more than 30,000 people in the early 1990s and at least 6,000 during a 44-day conflict in 2020.
Russia, the US and France tried unsuccessfully for decades to negotiate a settlement in a region that sits at the crossroads of trade and energy flows but has been riven by years of strife.
“We’re opening a chapter of peace, prosperity and security and economic cooperation in the South Caucasus,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said, hailing Trump’s contribution.
“This is a tangible result of President Trump’s leadership,” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said. He and Pashinyan added they plan to jointly nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump cited the deal as the latest of a string of international peace agreements for which he claims credit. He talked up his role in a treaty between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, and in ceasefires between Iran and Israel, India and Pakistan, and Thailand and Cambodia.
Although senior administration officials acknowledged the agreement will presage more talks – and many more details will need to be hashed out — they said the arrangement promised to help ease regional tensions that have handed Russian President Vladimir Putin leverage.
Under the agreement, the US will get exclusive development rights for up to 99 years to a transit route across southern Armenia linking the bulk of Azerbaijan’s territory to the exclave of Naxcivan, which borders its ally Turkey. The administration is calling it the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.
Armenia had rejected a transit corridor as a breach of sovereignty, while saying that borders and transport routes would be open as a result of a peace agreement anyway.
The US officials said the route would open up trade opportunities for Armenia in partnership with the US. Talks on the commercial elements of the deal will begin next week.
As part of the agreements, the US also lifted restrictions on defense cooperation with Azerbaijan, Trump said.
Those limits have been in place for more than three decades. “We are starting the path toward strategic partnership” with the US, Azerbaijan’s Aliyev said.
Azerbaijan exports oil through a pipeline connecting its Caspian Sea output with Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan via Georgia and bypassing Armenia. It also supplies natural gas to 10 European countries, including Greece and Italy, via the US-backed Southern Gas Corridor. In 2022, it signed a deal with the European Union to double gas exports to the bloc by 2027.
Energy-rich Azerbaijan and landlocked Armenia have sought to negotiate a final peace agreement since the 2020 war, including a delineation of their state border, though talks have stumbled over Azerbaijani demands for changes to the Armenian constitution to exclude claims on Nagorno-Karabakh.
Putin brokered a truce to halt the 2020 war, in which Azerbaijan took most of Nagorno-Karabakh and reclaimed six surrounding areas occupied by Armenian forces for decades. But the sides did not reach a final peace agreement.
In September 2023, Azerbaijani troops gained control of the rest of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning military operation that triggered the exodus of more than 100,000 Armenians from the territory into neighboring Armenia. Russia peacekeepers were withdrawn last year after the Armenian population fled.
The 2020 war represented a strategic triumph for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who backed Azerbaijan and was able to muscle into Russia’s backyard at time.
With assistance from Kate Sullivan and Eric Martin.
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