The railway will run from the eastern Turkish city of Kars to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave. Speaking during a ground-breaking ceremony held in the area, Turkish Transport and Infrastructure minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said its construction will be “one of the clearest steps in the implementation of the Zangezur corridor.”
The ceremony came almost two weeks after agreements reached by U.S. President Donald Trump, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev during talks held at the White House. Pashinian pledged to give the United States exclusive rights to a transit corridor that will connect Nakhichevan to the rest of Azerbaijan through Armenia’s Syunik province.
Aliyev on Thursday described the deal as a “historic achievement” for Azerbaijan. The opening of what Baku calls the “Zangezur corridor” has been one of his conditions for making peace with Armenia.
Pashinian’s domestic critics say the transit corridor named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) would undermine Armenian sovereignty over Syunik and lead to the kind of an extraterritorial corridor that has been sought by Baku. Pashinian denied that on Thursday, reiterating that the TRIPP will not breach Armenia’s territorial integrity. He again declined to reveal crucial details of the transit arrangement, claiming that they have yet to be worked out.
A joint declaration by Aliyev and Pashinian makes only a general reference to the TRIPP while a relevant U.S.-Armenian memorandum also signed in Washington on August 8 has still not been made public. The memorandum reportedly calls for a long-term U.S. lease on the transit routes.
Levon Zurabian, an Armenian opposition figure, accused Pashinian of deliberately “hiding the text from the Armenian people” in an effort to mislead them.
“If [the memorandum] is not classified, why has it still not been published 12 days after its signing?” Zurabian said in a social media post.
