- Agreement includes US rights to South Caucasus Transit Corridor.
- Deal first marks the thawing of frozen conflicts near Russia since the Cold War.
- Lifts restrictions on defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the United States.
Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a US-broken peace deal on Friday during a meeting with US President Donald Trump, who would increase bilateral economic ties after decades of conflict.
The trade between South Caucasus -Rivals – provided it has – would be a significant achievement for the Trump administration, which will surely rattle Moscow, who sees the region as within its sphere of influence.
“It’s a long time – 35 years – they fought, and now they are friends and they are becoming friends for a long time,” Trump said at a white house signing ceremony where he was flanked by Azerbaijanian President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at odds since the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous Azerbaijan region mostly populated by ethnic Armenians, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia. Azerbaijan took back full control of the region in 2023, causing almost all the Territory’s 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.
Trump said the two countries had committed to stop fighting, open diplomatic relations and respect each other’s territorial integrity.
The agreement includes exclusive US development rights to a strategic transit corridor through the southern Caucasus, as the White House said would facilitate greater export of energy and other resources.
Trump said the United States signed separate agreements with each country to extend cooperation on energy, trade and technology, including artificial intelligence.
He said restrictions had also been abolished in defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the United States.
Both leaders praised Trump for helping to end the conflict and said they would nominate him at the Nobel Peace Prize. “So who, if not President Trump, deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?” Said Aliyev.
Trump has tried to present himself as a global peace maker in the first months of his second period. The White House credits him by mediating a ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand and sealing peace agreements between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic Congo and Pakistan and India.
However, he has not managed to end Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israeli’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza.
US officials said the agreement was hammered during repeated visits to the region and would create a basis for working against a full normalization between the countries.
Senior administrative officials told journalists that the agreement marked the first end to several frozen conflicts about Russia’s periphery since the end of the Cold War and said it would send a powerful signal to the entire region.
The peace agreement could transform the South Caucasus, an energy-producing region that neighboring Russia, Europe, Turkey and Iran, crossed by oil and gas pipelines, but recovery of closed borders and long-standing ethnic conflicts.
Armenia plans to award the US exclusive special development rights for a long period of the transit corridor, the administrative officials told Reuters this week. The so-called Trump route for international peace and prosperity has already drawn interest from nine companies, including three US companies, an official said on condition of anonymity.
Daphne Panayotatos, with the Washington-based rights group Freedom Now, said it has called on the Trump administration to use the meeting with Aliyev to demand the release of about 375 political prisoners held in the country.
Azerbaijan, an oil -producing country hosting the United Nations Climate Summit in November last year, has rejected Western criticism of his human rights record and described it as unacceptable interference.
