The leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia signed an agreement aimed at ending decades of conflict as they were hosted by President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan shook hands after the US president described the event as “historic”.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Trump said of the agreement, which will reopen some key transport routes between the countries and increase US influence in the region.
Azerbaijan and Armenia fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, in the 1980s and 1990s and violence has flared up in the years since.
On Friday, Trump said Armenia and Azerbaijan had promised to stop all fighting “forever” as well as open up travel, business and diplomatic relations.
“We are today establishing peace in the Caucasus,” Aliyev said. “We lost a lot of years being preoccupied with wars and occupation and bloodshed.”
Pashinyan called the signing a “significant milestone” in relations between the two countries.
“Thirty-five years they fought, and now they’re friends and they’re going to be friends a long time,” Trump said at the event.
The White House said that, as part of the deal, the US will also help build a major transit corridor that will be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.
The route will connect Azerbaijan and its autonomous Nakhchivan exclave, which are separated by Armenian territory. In the past, Aliyev has demanded that Armenia give his country a railroad corridor to Nakhichevan.
Armenia wanted to have control of the road and the Azerbaijani leader has in the past threatened to take the corridor by force. The issue has halted and stalled previous peace negotiations.
Both leaders praised Trump and his team throughout the meeting: “President Trump, in six months, did a miracle,” Aliyev said.
Trump said he had also signed a bilateral agreement with both countries to expand energy and technology trade.
The US president has sought to make peace deals between several warring countries during his second term.
The summit on Friday also signifies the US expanding its influence in the region at the expense of Russia. For more than a century, the Kremlin has played the role of power and peace broker there.
Most recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has acted as the main mediator in the conflict. The last agreement signed by Aliyev and Pashinyan was crafted by Putin.
With Trump now bringing the two countries together, Putin is largely sidelined. Moscow has worked to insert its interests into peace talks, but both sides abandoned those proposals in favour of an American solution.
The announcement on Friday came shortly before Trump announced that he would meet Putin for talks in Alaska next week.
