Aliyev and Pashinian were among dozens of foreign leaders invited to the summit in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh held after Israel and Hamas agreed to a U.S.-sponsored cease-fire and hostage release deal.
Trump praised Aliyev as a “very strong ruler” who is “doing a great job” when he addressed the one-day meeting. “I just solved the [Armenian-Azerbaijani] war for him,” he told the audience.
“Where is your compatriot?” Trump then asked Aliyev, referring to Pashinian, who sat a few seats away from the Azerbaijani leader. “You guys are still getting along, right?”
“They fought for 32 years and in one hour we settled it,” he said. “And they like each other.”
Pashinian tried to strike up a conversation with Trump at the end of the summit when the U.S. president thanked its participants from a podium.
“I’m the prime minister of Armenia. You remember me?” he said before seemingly thanking Trump for brokering Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements in Washington on August 8.
“And now you…,” Pashinian went on just as Trump interrupted the conversation and turned to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto who also approached him.
Pashinian’s behavior drew ridicule from his political opponents and other critics in Armenia. They again pointed out that Trump apparently could not remember the Armenian prime minister’s name in his previous public comments on the Aliyev-Pashinian meeting hosted by him at the White House.
“This man has failed to realize that Trump made a deal with Ilham Aliyev and [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu,” said Levon Zurabian of the opposition Armenian National Congress (HAK). “He will always be destined to break protocol and chase Donald Trump down at various world summits and tell him, ‘I am the prime minister of Armenia.’”
The White House summit resulted in the initialing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. Baku continues to make the signing of the treaty conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution, something which requires a nationwide referendum. Also, Pashinian pledged to give the United States exclusive rights to a transit corridor through Armenia demanded by Azerbaijan. Practical modalities of this transit arrangement do not seem to have been worked out so far.
Despite these uncertainties, Trump has repeatedly claimed to have brokered an end to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Significantly, the U.S. State Department again advised Americans last month to stay away from Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan because of what it called a lingering “potential for armed conflict” between the two South Caucasus countries.
The border areas include the southern section of Armenia’s Syunik province adjacent to Iran, the site of the U.S.-administered corridor that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave.
Meeting with Pashinian at the White House on August 8, Trump promised to ask Aliyev to free at least 23 Armenian prisoners held by Azerbaijan. It is still not clear whether he has done that.
Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan insisted on Tuesday that Yerevan keeps trying to secure the release of the prisoners, among them eight former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Just yesterday, within the framework of the peace summit held in Sharm el-Sheikh, we again discussed this issue with our Azerbaijani partners,” he said. “Let's hope that our efforts will bear positive results in the near future.”