Washington: Azerbaijan and Armenia signed an initial peace agreement negotiated in the United States during a meeting with President Donald Trump on Friday, an agreement destined to boost economic ties between the two countries after decades of conflict, said the White House.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told journalists that Trump signed separate agreements with Armenia and Azerbaijan on energy, technology, economic cooperation, border security, infrastructure and trade. No more details were provided.
The agreement includes the exclusive development rights of the United States to a strategic transit corridor through the South Caucasus, called “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.”
American officials said the agreement was expelled during repeated visits to the region and would provide a basis for working towards complete standardization between countries.
Neither the joint declaration that will be signed nor the bilateral agreements were released with the US.
It was not immediately clear how the agreement that was signed on Friday would address thorny issues, such as the demarcation of shared borders and Baku’s demand for a change in the Ereván Constitution, which includes a reference to a 1989 call for the reunification of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, then an autonomous region within Soviet Azerbaiijan.
The officials informed the reporters on the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have disagreed since the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region of Azerbaijan that had an ethnic armenian population, separated from Azerbaiyan with the support of Armenia.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan won the independence of the Soviet Union in 1991. Azerbaijan raised the total control of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 in a military offensive, which caused almost all the remaining 100,000 armenians of the territory to go to Armenia.
American officials highlighted the opportunities presented for both countries and US investors through the creation of the new Transit Corridor, which will allow greater exports of energy and other resources.
“What will happen here with the Trump route is that this is not a charity. This is a highly invertible entity,” said a senior administration official, and added that at least nine companies had expressed interest in the operation of the transit corridor, including three US companies.
Safer and prosperous
According to a carefully negotiated section of the documents signed on Friday, Armenia plans to grant the exclusive Special Development Rights of the United States for a prolonged period in a transit corridor that will be called the Trump route for international peace and prosperity, and known by the acronym Tripp, officials said. Reuters this week.
Trump would sign a directive to establish a negotiation team to solve details on how to operate the corridor, with the initial commercial negotiations to start next week, said one of the officials.
“The losers here are China, Russia and Iran. The winners here are the West,” said one of the officials.
“Both countries that have been in conflict for 35 years … Look and talk about full peace tomorrow.”
“It is being done, not through force, but through the commercial association … with these two countries,” said the official.
“The joint declaration that we will see today is the first peace statement bilaterally signed by the two countries since the end of the Cold War.”
Posted in Dawn, August 9, 2025
