According to the Armenian Foreign Ministry, the delegations headed by deputy prime ministers made “mutual visits” to undisclosed border areas in their respective countries in accordance with Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements reached in Washington on August 8.
A ministry statement said they discussed the delimitation of “appropriate sections of the border” and time frames for the “construction and restoration of necessary infrastructure” there “for the purpose of synchronizing actions on creating communications.” It gave no other details.
It was not immediately clear whether the Azerbaijani officials led by Deputy Prime Minister Sahin Mustafayev visited the site of a transit corridor in Armenia’s Syunik province that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian pledged to give the United States exclusive rights to the corridor during the August 8 talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump. Key practical modalities of this arrangement criticized by Russia and Iran remain unknown.
A joint declaration signed by Aliyev and Pashinian at the White House says only that Armenia will ensure “unhindered communication” between Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan. Pashinian said last week that Armenian, Azerbaijani and U.S. officials will meet in September to try to work out details of the would-be Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).
Pashinian’s domestic critics maintain that he agreed to open the kind of an extraterritorial “Zangezur corridor” that has been sought by Azerbaijan ever since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Giving them more ammunition, Aliyev described the TRIPP as the “Zangezur corridor” on Monday in a speech a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in China. Pashinian, who also attended the summit, publicly objected to that “vocabulary.”
Mustafayev and his Armenian counterpart Mher Grigorian head their governments’ respective commissions on the delimitation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. The Foreign Ministry statement said they “exchanged thoughts” on the next joint meeting of the commission. It gave no dates for the meeting.
An Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty initialed at the White House does not specify any mechanisms for the delimitation process. Pashinian downplayed this fact on August 18.
“The new logic of peace is that when saying there are sovereign territories of Armenia that are currently under Azerbaijani control, we must also say that there are sovereign territories of Azerbaijan that are under our control, and this mutual issue must be resolved in the delimitation process,” he said in a televised address to the nation.
This remark was construed by Armenian opposition leaders as a clear sign that Pashinian is intent on ceding more territory to Azerbaijan without receiving anything in return. Pashinian’s government unilaterally handed over four border areas to Azerbaijan last year, sparking massive anti-government demonstrations in Yerevan.