Armenia and Azerbaijan have vowed not to threaten force and to establish diplomatic relations in a US-brokered declaration
Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity as part of a peace declaration signed in Washington on Friday, the text of the document published by both nations suggests.
The 17-point agreement states that the two neighbors will refrain from the use of force or the threat of force in bilateral relations. They will also not allow any third party to use their territories for staging an attack on one of them and will not deploy any third-party forces to their mutual border.
Following the ratification of the deal, Baku and Yerevan also plan to officially establish diplomatic relations and open the way for further agreements in “respective areas of mutual interest.” They also plan to establish a bilateral commission ensuring the full implementation of the agreement and settle any future disputes through peaceful means.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and US President Donald Trump signed the joint declaration during what the American leader called a “historic peace summit.” It was initially reported that the agreement was focused solely on opening a key transport route in the region – the so-called Zangezur corridor.
The route connects Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhichevan through a narrow strip of land located in southern Armenia, which runs along the country’s border with Iran. The text published by Baku and Yerevan does not contain any mention of the Zangezur corridor or any specific references to transport issues.
The two post-Soviet states were locked in a territorial dispute over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh since the late 1980s. What was then a predominantly ethnic-Armenian-populated region violently seceded from Baku in the early 1990s. An unrecognized separate republic, it had been a source of constant tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan for more than two decades, with multiple flareups of fighting before Baku managed to regain control of the region by force in 2023.
