Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is scheduled to travel to Washington, DC, on August 7 and 8 for a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. An American official previously indicated that a framework for a peace agreement could be announced at a trilateral meeting hosted by Trump, where Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev would also be present.
This high-level meeting follows last month’s peace talks in Abu Dhabi, where the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan failed to announce a major breakthrough in their decades-old conflict. The two countries had finalized a draft peace deal in March, but no concrete steps were outlined in the final statement from those discussions.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus nations dates back to the late 1980s, when the Nagorno-Karabakh region, with support from Armenia, broke away from Azerbaijan. The territory, historically claimed by both countries after the fall of the Russian Empire, was predominantly populated by ethnic Armenians at the time.
In a significant turn of events, Azerbaijan recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. This led to the mass displacement of almost all of the territory’s 100,000 ethnic Armenians, who fled to Armenia. Armenia has since taken a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Azerbaijan of “erasing all traces” of ethnic Armenians from the disputed territory. The legal case is linked to the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh, which resulted in more than 6,600 deaths and was one of three full-scale wars fought over the region.
The ICJ has ordered Azerbaijan to allow the ethnic Armenians who fled to return. Azerbaijan, in turn, maintains that it is committed to ensuring the safety and security of all residents, regardless of their national or ethnic origin, and denies forcing ethnic Armenians, who are mostly Christian, to leave. Azerbaijan, a predominantly Muslim nation, also links its own historical identity to the territory and has accused Armenians of driving out ethnic Azeris who lived near the region in the 1990s.
