Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian committed himself to such an arrangement during talks with U.S. President Donald Trump and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held at the White House last August. The planned Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) is due to connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through Armenia’s strategic Syunik region bordering Iran.
In a statement, the Armenian government said Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigorian discussed with the visiting officials from the U.S. State Department and International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) progress in the implementation of that agreement. It did not name any of the U.S. officials.
“The parties discussed and agreed on a number of practical and legal issues related to the implementation of TRIPP,” the statement added without elaborating.
The U.S. Embassy in Yerevan did not immediately issue a readout of the talks. There was also no statement by the DFC, a U.S. government agency financing and providing political risk insurance to development projects in foreign countries.
According to a joint U.S.-Armenian “implementation framework” signed in January, a special company controlled by the U.S. government will build a railway, a road, energy supply lines and other infrastructure along the Armenian-Iranian border and manage them for at least 49 years.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on March 12 that the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran will likely delay the TRIPP’s implementation. But he sounded more optimistic on that score after more U.S.-Armenian talks on the project held in the following weeks. The State Department said on April 9 that the project “remains a top priority for the United States.”
The latest talks came less than a month before Armenia’s crucial parliamentary elections. The three main opposition groups challenging Pashinian’s Civil Contract have said that the TRIPP would undermine Armenian sovereignty over Syunik and antagonize Iran.
Iranian officials spoke out against the transit arrangement in the months leading up to the war. They feared that it could lead to U.S. security presence along the Armenian-Iranian border. Some observers believe that Tehran will now be even more opposed to the transit arrangement. Russia, whose border guards are deployed along that frontier, has likewise voiced misgivings regarding it.
“A number of experts believe that against the backdrop of the Iranian-American conflict, prospects for the launch of the ‘Trump Route’ are cloudy,” a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official was reported to say on Tuesday.