WASHINGTON - Azerbaijan and Armenia will sign an initial US-brokered peace agreement during a meeting with US President Donald Trump on Friday, a deal aimed at boosting economic ties between the two countries after decades of conflict, the White House said.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told reporters that Trump would sign separate deals with both Armenia and Azerbaijan on energy, technology, economic cooperation, border security, infrastructure and trade. No further details were provided.
Trump will meet separately with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at the White House, beginning at 2:30 p.m. (1830 GMT), with a trilateral meeting set for 4:15 p.m. (2015 GMT), the White House said.
The agreement includes exclusive US development rights to a strategic transit corridor through the South Caucasus, dubbed the "Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity."
US officials said the agreement was hammered out during repeated visits to the region and would provide a basis for working toward a full normalisation between the countries.
Neither the joint declaration due to be signed nor the separate bilateral agreements with the US were released.
It was not immediately clear how the deal being signed on Friday would address thorny issues such as the demarcation of shared borders and Baku's demand for a change in Yerevan's constitution, which includes a reference to a 1989 call for the reunification of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, then an autonomous region within Soviet Azerbaijan.
Officials briefing reporters skirted over the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at odds since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh - a mountainous Azerbaijani region that had a mostly ethnic Armenian population - broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Azerbaijan took back full control of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 in a military offensive, prompting almost all of the territory's remaining 100,000 Armenians to flee to Armenia.
The expected signing won praise from US lawmakers, while civil society groups urged continued focus on human rights issues in the region.
Representatives Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, and Robert Aderholt, an Alabama Republican, who co-chair the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus, welcomed moves by both countries to resolve their longstanding differences.
"This agreement is a significant step forward and yet another powerful example of what strong American diplomacy can achieve," Aderholt said in a statement. "This is a moment of hope, and I pray it leads to lasting peace in the region."
Daphne Panayotatos, with the Washington-based rights group Freedom Now, said it has urged the Trump administration to use the meeting with Aliyev to raise concerns about "systemic human rights abuses" and demand the release of some 375 political prisoners held in the country.
Azerbaijan, an oil-producing country that hosted the U.N. climate summit last November, has angrily rejected Western criticism of its human rights record, describing it as unacceptable interference.
US officials said the new transit corridor would offer opportunities for both countries and US investors by facilitating greater exports of energy and other resources.
"What's going to happen here with the Trump route is, this isn't charity. This is a highly investable entity," said one senior administration official, adding that at least nine companies had in recent days expressed interest in operating the transit corridor, including three US firms.
'SAFER AND MORE PROSPEROUS'
Under a carefully negotiated section of the documents the leaders will sign on Friday, Armenia plans to award the US exclusive special development rights for an extended period on a transit corridor that will be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, and known by the acronym TRIPP, the officials told Reuters this week.
Trump would sign a directive to set up a negotiating team to work out details for how to operate the corridor, with initial commercial negotiations to begin next week, one of the officials said.
"The losers here are China, Russia and Iran. The winners here are the West," one of the officials said. "Both countries that have been in conflict for 35 years ... are looking and talking about full peace with each other tomorrow."
"It's being done, not through force, but through commercial partnership ... with these two countries," the official said. "The joint declaration that we're going to see signed today is the first-ever peace declaration signed bilaterally by the two countries since the end of the Cold War."
Trump has tried to present himself as a global peacemaker in the first months of his second term. The White House credits him with brokering a ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand and sealing peace deals between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Pakistan and India. He also is intensifying efforts to end Russia's war in Ukraine, eyeing a possible meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin as early as next week.
Senior administration officials told reporters the agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan marked the first end to 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.
"This isn't just about Armenia. It's not just about Azerbaijan. It's about the entire region, and they know that that region is going to be safer and more prosperous with President Trump," a senior administration official said.
A peace deal could transform the South Caucasus, an energy-producing region neighbouring Russia, Europe, Turkey and Iran that is criss-crossed by oil and gas pipelines but riven by closed borders and longstanding ethnic conflicts.
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