Meeting with Pashinian at the White House on August 8, Trump pledged to ask Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to free the “23 Christians.” He said he is confident that Aliyev will agree to do that. It is still not clear whether Trump acted on the pledge.
Pashinian revealed that he raised the matter with U.S. Under Secretary of State Allison Hooker when he met her in Yerevan on Monday.
“During the meeting, I specifically addressed that issue, noting that President Trump has spoken, including publicly, about his commitment to addressing that issue,” he told journalists.” “I presented what we are doing on a bilateral level regarding that issue, and I asked the U.S. under secretary of state to provide information on U.S. efforts made in that direction, and I asked her to keep the issue in the spotlight.”
Pashinian said nothing about Hooker’s response. The U.S. official proceeded to Baku from Yerevan. Her talks with Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders focused on details of a U.S.-administered transit corridor for Azerbaijan which would pass through a key Armenian region.
According to an Armenian newspaper report, Aliyev’s top foreign policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, told a senior Armenian official on August 30 that Baku cannot grant Trump’s request. Hajiyev also reportedly objected to Yerevan’s use of the phrase “Christian prisoners.”
The prisoners include eight former political and military leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh who went on trial in January along with eight other Karabakh Armenians also captured during Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive. An Azerbaijani prosecutor demanded last week life sentences for five of the ex-leaders and 20-year jail terms for two others.
Pashinian is regularly accused by his domestic critics of doing little to secure the release of the prisoners. The premier has dismissed their claims.
Neither an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty initialed in Washington on August 8 nor a separate declaration signed by Trump, Aliyev and Pashinian on the same day commits Baku to freeing the captives. Nor did Pashinian explicitly demand their release when he addressed the UN General Assembly and the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly in September.