Armenia says it rejected US lease over road in Syunik over sovereignty concerns
A ruling Civil Contract MP has said that Armenia rejected an offer to lease a road — likely a corridor connecting Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan — to the US, citing concerns over ‘conceding sovereignty’.
MP Arman Yeghoyan, the head of the European Integration Committee in parliament, made the statement in an interview with Factor TV on Thursday.
‘The US had an offer to lease a road, which we did not accept. We noticed a danger of conceding sovereignty’, he said.
He added that the Armenian government only supports the opening of such a road while preserving its sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territorial integrity.
He also denied ‘false rumours spread by Russia’ suggesting that American troops would man the road.
The opening of the road is a major sticking point in the ongoing peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
In mid-July, the US Ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, briefly talked about a US takeover of the road. However, Barrack appeared to make the comments in a vague tone, perhaps as a hypothetical example for a potential solution to the issue.
Armenia denied discussions about outsourcing control of the proposed read shortly after.
Shortly after, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan confirmed that Yerevan had received a US offer for unblocking regional transit links through Armenia. Pashinyan did not specify what routes would be unblocked, but stressed that Armenia is interested in and wants the transport infrastructure in the region to be unblocked.
He also said that the outsourcing of such a route would not compromise Armenia’s sovereignty, citing the country’s outsourcing of management of Yerevan’s Zvartnots Airport, its water system, railway, and previously, Armenia’s post operator, saying that those remain Armenian property.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
Asked about the possibility of the US overseeing traffic on a potential corridor, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said on 19 July that the question should be directed at the Armenian leadership, but added that ‘no operator, no trader, no lessee can be on our territory’.
‘Our cargo and citizens should not see the face of an Armenian border guard there every time. This is our demand. This is a legitimate demand, a fair demand. Otherwise, our citizens will be in danger’, he said.
In response, Armenia stressed that it ‘cannot be unaware of who entered its territory’, lest an ‘uncontrollable source of smuggling and trafficking could emerge’.
Yousef Bardouka
Russia continues to be sidelined
Russia has been quite vocal about its discontent with being pushed to the sides as the US and the West ramp up their involvement in the peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed that the West wanted to ‘transfer the process of reconciliation between Baku and Yerevan to their own tracks’.
She added that West’s ‘purely opportunistic’ motives ‘could lead to an imbalance in the security system in the region’.
Zakharova went on to say that American proposals to establish the road were not ‘unique’, and had already been agreed upon by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia following the end of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020.
‘The Americans, for example, say that they allegedly have — again, I quote them — “a unique solution to the issue”. In fact, they cannot offer anything new, except for what was done within the framework of the specialised trilateral working group co-chaired by the deputy prime ministers of Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. There is deceit here too.’
‘Unfortunately, due to the destructive influence of Westerners on the position of the Armenian authorities, the work in the group has stalled’, Zakharova claimed.
Nate Ostiller
