Azerbaijan-Arnean Peace Agreement’s Trump Brokers to upset Moscow

• The deal includes US rights in the southern Caucasus transit corridor.
• The agreement marks the first thawing of frozen conflicts near Russia by the Cold War.
• It lifts restrictions on defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the US.

Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a peace deal caused by the US on Friday during a meeting with US President Donald Trump that will boost bilateral financial links after decades of conflict.

The agreement between the opponents of the South Caucasus – assuming it holds – would be an important achievement for Trump’s administration that is sure to ring Moscow, which sees the area as in the realm of influence.

“It’s been a long time – 35 years – they fought and now they’re friends and it’s going to be friends for a long time,” Trump said at a signature ceremony at the White House, where he was framed by Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nicole Passan.

Armenia and Azerbaijan are in contrast to the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous area of Azerbaijan, mainly inhabited by ethnic Armenians, broke from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia. Azerbaijan took full control of the area in 2023, urging almost all 100,000 ethnic Armenians in the territory to leave Armenia.

Trump said the two countries had pledged to stop struggling, opening diplomatic relations and respecting each other’s territorial integrity.

The agreement includes exclusively US Rights of Development in a strategic transit corridor via the South Caucasus stated by the White House that it would facilitate greater exports of energy and other resources.

Trump said the United States signed separate agreements with each country to expand energy, commerce and technology, including artificial intelligence.

He said the restrictions had also been lifted for defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the United States.

Both leaders praised Trump to help end the conflict and said they would appoint him for the Nobel Peace Prize. “So who, if not President Trump, is worth the Nobel Peace Prize?” Said Aliyev.

Trump attempted to present himself as a global peacemaker in the first months of his second term. The White House attributes him by mediation of the ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand and sealing peace agreements between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan and India.

However, it failed to end Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza.

US officials said the agreement was forged during repeated visits to the area and would form the basis for the complete normalization of countries.

Senior officials of the administration told reporters that the agreement marked the first end in several frozen clashes in the Russian region since the end of the Cold War and said it would send a strong message across the region.

The peace agreement could turn the South Caucasus, an area that produces energy neighboring Russia, Europe, Turkey and Iran crossed by oil and gas pipelines, but runs from closed border and long -term ethnic conflicts.

Armenia plans to award the exclusive US Development Rights for a prolonged period in the transit corridor, Reuters told administration officials this week. The so -called Trump route for international peace and prosperity has already offered interest from nine companies, including three US companies, one official said.

Daphne Panayotatos, with the freedom of Washington rights now, said she has urged Trump’s administration to use Aliyev’s meeting to call for the liberation of about 375 political prisoners in the country.

Azerbaijan, a oil production country that hosted the United Nations Summit for the climate last November, rejected Western criticism of its human rights records, describing it as unacceptable intervention.