New US plan for Zangezur corridor jeopardizes Armenian sovereignty.
Olesya Vardanyan, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reported, citing two American diplomats, that the administration of US President Donald Trump has submitted a proposal for a route connecting Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan via Armenian territory to Yerevan and Baku.
Details of the US plan: replacing the European model with a trade guarantee model
According to these sources, the US proposal is similar to a plan put forward by the European Union years ago and based on the agreement between Russia and Georgia after the 2008 war. According to that plan, the parties intended to transfer management of the routes through the disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to an independent Swiss company that would undertake to transfer logistical data to all interested parties.
The Carnegie analyst writes that the European Union had also offered Yerevan and Baku to follow this model, but “these negotiations failed first due to the flare-up of new tensions on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and then after the escalation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023.”
Washington’s new plan proposes outsourcing the management of the route to a private American company.
“Washington’s proposal is based on the logic that the guarantor of the agreement should be an American business, as previously happened, for example, in Ukraine with the rare metals plant,” says Olesya Vardanyan.