US President Donald Trump said efforts to reach a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan appear to be moving toward a “successful conclusion.”
“We just seem to have Armenia and Azerbaijan. It looks like that’s going to come to a conclusion — a successful conclusion,” Trump said on Monday in a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the Oval Office.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held a meeting last week in the UAE, where the two sides agreed to continue bilateral engagements.
Relations between the two former Soviet republics have been tense since 1991, when the Armenian military occupied Karabakh – a territory internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan – and seven adjacent regions.
Most of the territory was liberated by Azerbaijan during a 44-day war in the fall of 2020, which ended after a Russian-brokered peace agreement that opened the door to normalisation and demarcation talks.
In September 2023, Azerbaijan established full sovereignty in Karabakh after separatist forces in the region surrendered.
On March 13, Baku and Yerevan declared that they had reached a consensus on all 17 articles of a peace deal, though an agreement has yet to be signed.
