Aliyev again described it as the “Zangezur corridor,” ignoring Pashinian’s objections repeated at their fresh meeting held last week.
“Another important outcome of the summit held in Washington last August is the opening of the Zangezur corridor,” he said during a summit of the leaders of Turkic states held in the Azerbaijani town of Gabala.
Pashinian publicly complained about the Azerbaijani term late last month, saying that it runs counter to the agreement brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on August 8 and is “perceived as a territorial claim” in Armenia.
A joint declaration signed by the three leaders at the White House does not specify practical modalities of a transit corridor that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through Armenia’s Syunik province. It says that Yerevan will give the U.S. exclusive rights to what will be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).
Pashinian’s domestic critics say the TRIPP amounts to the kind of an extraterritorial corridor that has been demanded by Aliyev ever since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Statements by Aliyev as well as Turkish officials have only given them more ammunition.
Responding to Aliyev’s latest statement, Pashinian’s press secretary, Nazeli Baghdasarian, revealed that the Armenian premier raised the matter with the Azerbaijani president when they met in Copenhagen on October 2 on the sidelines of a European Political Community summit.
“The issue, yes, was discussed during the Copenhagen meeting, and we reaffirm that the statement made by the Azerbaijani president cannot in any way apply to the territory of the Republic of Armenia,” Baghdasarian told the Armenpress news agency.
She said it is obvious from their joint readout of that meeting that only “the TRIPP project concerns the territory of Armenia.”
Yerevan’s objections again fell on deaf ears, with a joint declaration adopted by the participants of the Turkic summit later in the day stressing the importance of the “Zangezur corridor.”.
