Armenia and Azerbaijan ink Trump-brokered peace declaration

During the Friday event, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and Trump signed a joint declaration focused on opening a key transport route in the region – the so-called Zangezur corridor.

The route connects Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhichevan through a narrow strip of land located in southern Armenia, which runs along the country’s border with Iran.

The route is set to be developed and operated by American companies and will be known as the ‘Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity’. The US president said that having the route named after him was “a great honor” and claimed he “did not ask for this.”

Both Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders showered the US president with praise over the declaration. Pashinyan said the deal was a great success “for our countries and for our region and a success for the world,” which cemented Trump’s “legacy as a statesman and the peacemaker.” Aliyev said Trump was bringing “peace” to the whole Caucasus region, noting “and we are grateful for that.”

Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan are both former Soviet republics that have been locked in a territorial dispute over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh since the late 1980s. The predominantly ethnic-Armenian-populated region broke away from Baku in the early 1990s following a full-blown war. The territory had been the source of constant tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan for more than two decades, seeing multiple flareups and large-scale conflicts, before Baku managed to regain control of the region by force in 2023.