A year of Pashinyan’s lies about TRIPP

(What Pashinyan isn’t saying)

Exactly one year has passed since August 8, 2025, when, in Washington, with the mediation of the administration of Donald Trump, a preliminary peace agreement between Yerevan and Baku was signed, along with a bilateral document launching the TRIPP project. Yet a review of this diplomatic year reveals a deep asymmetry between the expectations declared by Yerevan and the real balance of forces. Over the past twelve months, actual construction work on TRIPP has still not begun, while the institutional, financial and geopolitical obligations of the Armenian side have significantly deepened. And this is without even mentioning the fact that the 2025 Washington summit led to the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group, which had spent decades working on settling the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.

During the visit of Ararat Mirzoyan, Foreign Minister of Armenia, to Washington on January 14, 2026, the two sides signed a Joint Statement on the Fundamentals for Implementing TRIPP. The document set out a punishing arrangement under which 74% of the shares of the TRIPP Development Company being created would be transferred to American entities for 49 years, with the right to merge, gift or transfer stakes to third parties. At the same time, Armenia took on obligations to allocate territory and to directly co-invest financially, effectively ceding revenues to an external operator. The same document established a management model in which Armenian state agencies were relegated to a “back office” role, while direct servicing of transit was handed to private US operators in a “front office” role. The phrase “unimpeded connectivity” effectively fulfilled a long-standing demand of Baku, allowing Azerbaijan to legalize an extraterritorial regime for the “Zangezur corridor” through an American mechanism.

Later, on May 26, 2026, Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, made a brief visit to Yerevan, during which a Joint Declaration and a Charter on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership were signed at Zvartnots Airport. Under these documents, Washington obtained exclusive status and priority rights to invest in key Armenian infrastructure and resources, including the development of critical minerals. Such haste ahead of the elections to Armenia’s National Assembly points to the White House’s desire to legally secure strategic assets for itself over the heads of Armenian governments, hedging against a possible change of political power in Yerevan. Meanwhile, Yerevan’s key humanitarian and strategic objectives remain unresolved. No genuine unblocking of regional transport routes has taken place. Baku is taking no steps toward the return of Armenian detainees and prisoners of war, and continues to keep the concept of “Western Azerbaijan” in the public sphere, still advancing territorial claims. Against this backdrop, the Azerbaijani side is moving to publicly shift responsibility. A statement by Jeyhun Bayramov, Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan, claiming that Baku has supposedly fulfilled most of its obligations and that it is now Yerevan’s turn, clearly reflects a strategy of placing the entire burden of demands solely on Armenia.

The geopolitical context of the project poses a particular danger. TRIPP is being implemented against the backdrop of the US course of “Maximum Pressure 2.0” against Iran. The appearance of American infrastructure on the Armenian-Iranian border in Syunik cannot but be perceived by Tehran as a direct threat, turning the territory of the Republic of Armenia into a potential theater of military operations with its immediate, centuries-old neighbor.

A clear indicator of the White House’s pragmatic approach came in recent telephone contacts between Donald Trump and regional leaders, during which the US president invited Aliyev to the G20 summit while ignoring Pashinyan. This demonstrated that Washington regards Baku as a priority energy and logistics partner, while Yerevan is expected merely to consistently hand over resources and sovereign functions. The year that has passed since the signing of the Washington documents reveals an obvious imbalance: Armenia has handed external partners the institutional and economic levers for managing infrastructure and natural resources, and has put its relations with Iran at risk, without receiving in return either a genuine unblocking of borders, security guarantees, or a resolution of humanitarian issues.

Think about that…