- The agreement includes the rights of the United States to the South Caucaso Transit Corridor.
- The agreement marks the first thaw of frozen conflicts near Russia from the Cold War.
- He lifts the restrictions on defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the United States.
Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a negotiated peace agreement in the United States on Friday during a meeting with US President Donald Trump that would boost bilateral economic ties after decades of conflict.
The agreement between the rivals of the South Caucasus, assuming that it is sustained, would be a significant achievement for the Trump administration that will surely shake Moscow, which sees that the region is within its sphere of influence.
“It’s a long time, 35 years old, they fought and now they are friends, and they will be friends for a long time,” Trump said in a signature ceremony at the White House, where he was flanked by Azerbaiyan President Ilham Aliyev and Prime Minister Armenian Nikol Pashinyan.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have disagreed since the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region of Azerbaijan mostly populated by ethnic Armenians, separated from Azerbaiyan with the support of Armenia. Azerbaiyan recovered total control of the region in 2023, which caused almost all the 100,000 ethnic armenians of the territory to Huyan to Armenia.
Trump said the two countries had promised to stop fighting, open diplomatic relations and respect the territorial integrity of others.
The agreement includes the exclusive development rights of the United States to a strategic traffic corridor through the South Caucasus that the White House said it would facilitate the greatest exports of energy and other resources.
Trump said the United States signed separate agreements with each country to expand cooperation in energy, commerce and technology, including artificial intelligence.
He said that restrictions had also risen in defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the United States.
Both leaders praised Trump for helping to put an end to the conflict and said they would name him for the Nobel Peace Prize. “So who, if not President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?” Aliyev said.
Trump has tried to present himself as a global pacifier in the first months of his second term. The White House attributes a high fire between Cambodia and Thailand and sealing peace agreements between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Pakistan and India.
However, he has failed to put an end to the Russian war in Ukraine or Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza.
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.
The senior administration officials told journalists that the agreement marked the first final of several frozen conflicts on 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, a neighboring energy producing region of Russia, Europe, Turkey and Iran that is crossed by oil and gas pipes, but divided by closed borders and ethnic conflicts of long data.
Armenia plans to grant the exclusive special development rights of the United States for a prolonged period in the Transit Corridor, administration officials said to Reuters this week. The so -called Trump route for international peace and prosperity has already attracted the interest of nine companies, including three US companies, said an official under anonymity.
Daphne Panayotatos, with the Rights Group based in Washington Freedom Now now, said he has urged 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 that organized the United Nations Climate Summit last November, has rejected Western criticisms of its human rights history, describing it as an unacceptable interference.
