Armenia and Azerbaijan initialed a bilateral peace treaty during talks between their leaders hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on August 8. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian also pledged to give the United States exclusive rights to a transit corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave that would pass through Armenia’s strategic Syunik region. Trump, Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev claimed that these agreements put an end to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
“We need to see how [the deal] will work because all the ecstatic reviews that were heard in the first few days after the meeting in Washington then somehow changed to skeptical assessments when the document was published,” said Lavrov. “And as it turns out, not everything was agreed upon there.”
Meeting with students and professors of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Lavrov suggested that the White House talks touted by Trump as yet another foreign policy achievement of the current U.S. administration were first and foremost a publicity stunt.
“I think that such a method [of foreign policy making] has the right to exist, but if nothing follows it, then it will simply remain a flash in the pan,” he said. “But we are interested in a real peace treaty being concluded.”
Russia’s official reaction to the preliminary deal on the transit corridor through Armenia was cautious. Moscow implied that it must not be at odds with Armenia’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), a Russian-led trade bloc, and the presence of Russian border guards along the Armenian-Iranian border adjacent to the would-be corridor.
Still, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, did criticize a U.S. proposal to administer the corridor when it was revealed in late July. She said it is part of the West’s continuing efforts to hijack the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace process and sideline regional powers such as Russia and Iran.
Zakharova also argued that Moscow brokered a similar transit arrangement in the wake of the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. She claimed that it fell through because of Western powers’ “destructive influence” on the Armenian government.
Lavrov similarly said that Armenia and Azerbaijan reached in Washington the kind of agreements that they already negotiated together with Russia in 2020-2022. The issue was almost certainly on the agenda of Pashinian’s talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin held on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in China on August 31.
Baku continues to make the signing of the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty, initialed at the White House, on a change of Armenia’s constitution. Also, the two sides have yet to agree on or at least publicize crucial details of what they call the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.
James O’Brien, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state, asserted recently that Azerbaijan “won a great deal” while Armenia got no “substantial peace dividend” from the Washington agreements. He also warned that Pashinian’s attempts to make the concessions demanded by Baku will be “deeply unpopular” in Armenia and will “hurt Pashinian further” ahead of the next Armenian elections due in June 2026. Pashinian lambasted O’Brien on August 28.