Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev (L), US President Donald Trump, and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan (R) shake hands after signing a peace treaty at the White House in Washington, DC, 8 August 2025. Photo: EPA/NATHAN HOWARD

The leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a peace deal at the White House in Washington on Friday as US President Donald Trump looked on, bringing to end decades of conflict between the two countries, Reuters reported on Friday.

“Thirty-five years they fought, and now they’re friends and they’re going to be friends a long time," predicted Trump, who sat between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan as they signed the painstakingly negotiated peace treaty.

Trump boasted of the benefits the peace deal was likely to bring not only to both countries, but also to the United States, which has been granted exclusive development rights to the Lachin Corridor, a strip of land connecting the long-contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, and which is to be renamed the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.

The peace agreement, which has been the subject of months of negotiations facilitated by Washington, creates a new transit corridor between Azerbaijan to and Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani region surrounded by Armenian territory whose exclave status has long been a sticking point in discussions between Baku and Yerevan.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have been in conflict for almost four decades over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region located within Azerbaijan despite its population being made up of an ethnic Armenian majority.

After three decades of the contested region of Karabakh being run by Armenia, Azerbaijan retook it in a surprise invasion in September 2023, leading to the mass exodus of some 100,000 ethnic Armenian residents.