U.S. President Donald Trump will host the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan for peace talks at the White House on Friday, a U.S. official said on Thursday.
The official told Reuters it was possible that the framework for a peace agreement could be announced at Friday's meeting. The Washington Post was the first to report on the talks.
Armenia also confirmed the talks. The trilateral meeting is "aimed at promoting peace, prosperity and economic cooperation in the region,” the government said in a statement posted on its Telegram messaging app.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who is travelling to Washington on Aug. 7-8, will also hold a bilateral meeting with Trump, the statement said.
In March, the two sides announced that they had agreed on the text of a draft peace agreement; however, progress has been sporadic and slow since then. The countries' leaders met in July in Abu Dhabi for talks. Azerbaijan has previously said that Armenia must change its constitution to remove indirect references to Karabakh's "independence" before signing a peace treaty. Yerevan denies this, but Pashinyan has repeatedly stressed, most recently this week, that the South Caucasus country's founding charter needs to be updated.
Relations between Baku and Yerevan have been tense since 1991, when the Armenian military occupied Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan and seven adjacent regions, including Lachin.
Most of the territory was liberated by Azerbaijan during a 44-day war in the fall of 2020, which ended after a Russian-brokered peace agreement that opened the door to normalization talks and the demarcation of their border.
After a series of slow-moving negotiations, Azerbaijan rushed in troops last year in September and swiftly seized back Karabakh, whose entire population of nearly 120,000 people returned to Armenia after rejecting a reintegration program Baku offered.
Earlier in 2024, Armenia withdrew from several Azerbaijani villages it had controlled since the early 1990s as part of the peace process.
