COPENHAGEN (Azatutyun) — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on the sidelines of a European summit in Denmark on Thursday, October 2, just days after accusing him of effectively making territorial claims against Armenia.
According to virtually identical Armenian and Azerbaijani readouts of the conversation, the two men discussed the implementation of their August 8 agreements reached in Washington and, in particular, Armenia’s pledge to open a US-administered transit corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave.
“They reaffirmed their willingness to continue working towards further strengthening peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” read the statement released by Pashinyan’s press office.
Yerevan and Baku have offered different interpretations of the transit arrangement that will be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). In a speech at a session of the UN General Assembly in New York last week, Aliyev again said that the TRIPP amounts to the extraterritorial “Zangezur Corridor” that has been sought by him ever since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Pashinyan objected to the term when he addressed the assembly two days later. He said it runs counter to the Washington agreements brokered by US President Donald Trump and is “perceived as a territorial claim” in Armenia.
Azerbaijani as well as Turkish officials ignored Pashinyan’s objections in the following days. Armenian opposition leaders, meanwhile, said that Pashinyan’s complaints make mockery of his claims about the resolution of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and Armenian control of the TRIPP.
