MOSCOW:
Russia cautiously welcomed a US-brokered draft deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan on Saturday, but Moscow’s regional ally Iran rejected the idea of a new border corridor backed by President Donald Trump.
The two former Soviet republics signed a peace deal in Washington on Friday to end a decades-long conflict, though the fine print and binding nature of the deal remained unclear.
The US-brokered agreement includes establishing a transit corridor through Armenia to connect Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan, a longstanding demand of Baku.
The United States would have development rights for the corridor — dubbed the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” — in the strategic and resource-rich region.
But Russia’s ally and the warring parties’ southern neighbour Tehran said it would not allow the creation of a such a corridor running along the Iranian border.
“With the implementation of this plot, the security of the South Caucasus will be endangered,” Akbar Velayati, an advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told the Tasnim news agency.
The planned corridor was “an impossible notion and will not happen”, while the area would become “a graveyard for Trump’s mercenaries”, he added.
In a similar tone, Moscow said it would “further analyze” the corridor clause, noting there were trilateral agreements in place between Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, from which no one had yet withdrawn.
“It should not be ignored that Armenia’s border with Iran is guarded by Russian border guards,” said Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
Moscow, previously a key backer of Armenia, still has a military base there. Embroiled in its Ukraine operation, launched in 2022, it did not intervene in the latest conflict.
This has strained the historically warm ties between Yerevan and Moscow, home to a large and influential Armenian diaspora, triggering Armenia’s drift towards the West.
Christian-majority Armenia and Muslim-majority Azerbaijan went to war twice over their border and the status of ethnic enclaves within each other’s territories.
Moscow, once the main power broker in the Caucasus, is now bogged down in its more than three-year offensive in Ukraine, diverting political and military resources into the grinding conflict of attrition.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan praised the US efforts in settling the conflict. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev even said he would back President Donald Trump’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
