President Trump, Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev, shortly after signing a non-binding declaration at the White House on Friday. (primeminister.am)
“We have a very comprehensive agreement,” said U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday, with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan sitting on his right, and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia sitting on his left. “It’s a peace agreement. This isn’t a ceasefire. This is a peace agreement.”
In fact, however, Armenia and Azerbaijan still have not signed a peace treaty, after thirty-five years of war, and nearly two years after Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh), a self-governing Armenian republic, and expelled its entire Armenian Christian population.
Instead, at the White House on Friday, Aliyev and Pashinyan “initialed” a peace treaty, and then signed a “joint declaration” acknowledging “the need to continue further actions to achieve the signing and ultimate ratification of the Agreement.”
Aliyev and Pashinyan also signed a joint appeal to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), asking the regional security organization to end the peace process it has been leading for Armenia and Azerbaijan since 1995 – thus fulfilling another demand from Azerbaijan.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to the text of a peace treaty in March of this year – five months ago. But Azerbaijan has so far refused to sign it. It is demanding that Armenia first revise its constitution to eliminate any references to Nagorno Karabakh as part of the Armenian homeland. Such a revision would require a nationwide vote by Armenia’s population, which is not expected before 2026.
Ethnic cleansing of Armenians ignored
During the 45-minute-long public event at the White House on Friday, none of the three leaders mentioned Nagorno Karabakh, the ethnically-cleansed territory whose 150,000 Armenian Christian inhabitants now live in exile, mostly in Armenia.
This is in spite of the fact that it was Azerbaijan’s first, failed attempt to conquer and ethnically cleanse Nagorno Karabakh after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 that set off the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the first place.
One reporter at the event asked the three leaders, “Will the Armenians from Nagorno Karabakh be allowed to return?” but all three men ignored the question.
The three leaders also made no mention of the 23 Armenians held hostage by Azerbaijan, and the 80 more Armenians forcibly disappeared by Azerbaijan. (“Forcibly disappeared” means that Azerbaijan denies holding them, although they were last seen alive in Azerbaijani hands).
Earlier in the day, President Trump met with Armenia’s prime minister in the Oval Office. There, the U.S. president mentioned the “23 Christians” and said, “I am going to ask him [most likely meaning Aliyev] to do that. I think he’ll do it for me.”
Calls to support Swiss Peace Initiative for Nagorno Karabakh
Representatives of the displaced Karabakh Armenians reacted with concern to the confusing meeting at the White House.
The Artsakh Union expressed “deep concern” over “the absolute disregard for and violation of the rights of the people of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), who have been subjected to genocide and forcible deprivation of their homeland.”
The Committee for the Defense of the Fundamental Rights of the People of Nagorno Karabakh, which was appointed by the parliament of Nagorno Karabakh after the ethnic cleansing in 2023, and has mandate to campaign for the Armenians’ right of return, called the failure by any of the three leaders to even mention Nagorno Karabakh “alarming.”
The Committee noted that the Armenians’ right to return to their homeland has recently received support in the Swiss Peace Initiative for Nagorno Karabakh, a planned peace forum between the Azerbaijan and the representatives of the people of Nagorno Karabakh which the Swiss government is committed to holding.
A committee of Swiss parliamentarians called the White House meeting “a promising further step towards securing a permanent peace in the South Caucasus” but added, “Now is the right time for the Swiss Peace Initiative for Nagorno Karabakh. As long as 120,000 Armenians remain displaced from their homeland in Nagorno Karabakh, the decades-old Nagorno Karabakh conflict will remain unresolved, and will continue to undermine the prospects for a lasting peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
“We urge President Trump, President Aliyev, Prime Minister Pashinyan, and other actors invested in peace negotiations in the region to support the Swiss Peace Initiative,” the parliamentarians wrote. “Together, we can complete the hard work of building a lasting peace.”
End of the OSCE Minsk peace process?
The Committee for the Defense of the Fundamental Rights of the People of Nagorno Karabakh, led by former Armenian foreign minister Vartan Oskanian, also stated its “regret” over “the appeal to terminate the mandate of the OSCE Minsk Group,” which was a key demand of Azerbaijan.
“We call on the OSCE to resist this action,” they said.
The OSCE is an organization of 57 countries in Europe, North America and Asia, which took the lead on the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan after the first Karabakh war in the 1990s. Under the OSCE peace process, Armenia and Azerbaijan had both agreed to resolve the Nagorno Karabakh conflict on the basis of three principles: 1) self-determination for Nagorno Karabakh’s people, 2) respect for the territorial integrity of Armenia and Azerbaijan and 3) the non-use of force.
This did not stop Azerbaijan from launching a full-scale attack on Nagorno Karabkah’s Armenians in September 2020, a war which killed thousands and set the stage for the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh in September 2023. Afterwards, President Aliyev boasted, “Many reiterated that there was no military solution to the conflict. We have shown that there is.”
Threat of future war
Despite the friendly tone at the White House on Friday, Azerbaijan’s long list of outstanding demands raises the question of whether Aliyev will sooner or later try for another “military solution.”
Aside from the war Azerbaijan launched in 2020 and its ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh in 2023, Azerbaijan launched deadly attacks on the Republic of Armenia in May 2021, September 2022, and March 2024. Azerbaijan seized over 200 square kilometers of Armenian territory during these incursions, land which it continues to occupy. Azerbaijani troops regularly fire on Armenian villages near the border.
A European monitoring mission now patrols the border to discourage further Azerbaijani aggression, but the unsigned peace treaty requires the border to be free of foreign observers – at Azerbaijan’s demand.
President Aliyev and official organs of his government regularly refer to the entire Republic of Armenia as “West Azerbaijan.” In December 2022, Aliyev declared, “Present-day Armenia is our land. …let us work together on returning to Western Azerbaijan. Now that the Karabakh conflict has been resolved, this is the issue on our agenda.”
Azerbaijan also demands that it be given an extraterritorial corridor across Armenian territory, to allow it to transport people and good to its non-contiguous territory of Nakhichevan, without going through Armenian border checks – potentially slicing southern Armenia in two.
In the joint declaration signed at the White House on Friday, Armenia promised to work with the U.S. to build the “TRIPP” (Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity) across their territory. But it remains unclear how this route will work, or whether Azerbaijan will be satisfied.
At the White House on Friday, an Armenian journalist asked President Trump what the consequences would be if either Armenia or Azerbaijan broke the agreement they had just signed, since it was not a “legally binding document.”
President Trump said he was confident that would never happen. President Aliyev in turn told the journalist, “You can be absolutely sure, as well as the Azerbaijani community, that what has happened today will result in peace, long-lasting peace, eternal peace in the Caucasus.”
Prime Minister Pashinyan responded, “Fully agree, nothing to add.”
