It was announced after Pashinian’s talks with Aliyev hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump on August 8 that Armenia will give the United States exclusive rights to a road, a railway and possibly energy supply lines that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through a key Armenian region. They would be part of a transit corridor named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).
Although key practical modalities of this arrangement remain unknown, Pashinian’s domestic critics claim that it would lead to the kind of an extraterritorial “Zangezur corridor” that has been sought by Azerbaijan ever since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Pashinian and other Armenian officials have denied this.
However, senior Azerbaijani official stated last week that Yerevan accepted Baku’s demands for the land corridor to Nakhichevan during the Washington talks. Aliyev effectively echoed their statements when he spoke at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit held in the Chinese city of Tianjin.
“The Zangezur corridor will benefit all of Azerbaijan’s near and distant neighbors,” he said.
Pashinian objected to Aliyev’s use of the Azerbaijani term in his ensuing speech at the summit.
“The vocabulary used by the president of Azerbaijan is not perceived by us to be in the logic that we agreed on in Washington, especially given that within the framework of these agreements, Armenia and the United States will implement a communications investment program called the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” he said.
He insisted that the TRIPP “stems” from the Armenian government’s Crossroads of Peace program that calls for full Armenian control over all transit routes passing through the country.
A joint declaration signed by Aliyev and Pashinian at the White House on August 8 says only that Armenia will ensure “unhindered communication” between Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan through its Syunik province. Pashinian said last week that Armenian, Azerbaijani and U.S. officials will meet in September to try to work out details of this arrangement.
Aliyev has said all along that the transit of people and cargo through Syunik must be exempt from Armenian border controls. He insisted ahead of the Washington summit that Azerbaijanis travelling to from Nakhichevan “should not see the faces of Armenian border guards or anyone else.” Pashinian has made ambiguous statements on this subject.
Aliyev and Pashinian met in Tianjin earlier on Monday. The two sides gave few details in their identical readouts of the talks.