Following their brief talks in Yerevan, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan have signed a bilateral framework agreement on practical modalities of opening a U.S.-administered transit corridor for Azerbaijan through Armenia.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry released on Thursday a short video of Mirzoyan putting his signature under the deal.
“Secretary of State Rubio signed the agreement [on Monday,] the document was sent to Armenia, and now I have signed it on behalf of the Armenian side,” said Mirzoyan. “With this, the remote signing process is complete, and the agreement is ready for ratification.”
Mirozyan and Rubio initialed the deal when they met at Yerevan’s Zvartnots international airport on May 26. The top U.S. diplomat described it on Tuesday as an “opportunity to revolutionize Armenia’s strategic location.”
“It solves the issue of access that Azerbaijan cared about and which was an irritant in the relationship, but it does much more than that,” he told the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. “It has the ability to transform the Armenian economy in a very powerful way.”
The agreement reaffirms the key terms of a joint “implementation framework” for the planned Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) signed by the two men in January. Those include the creation of a joint U.S.-Armenian venture that will manage for at least 49 years a railway, a road, energy supply lines and other infrastructure to be built along the Armenian-Iranian border to connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave.
The U.S. government will own 74 percent of the TRIPP Development Company (TDC). The Armenian side is to grant the company “exclusive land use rights, development rights, related permissions, and all other rights” necessary for the transit arrangement.
The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) formally approved support for the company’s creation on Wednesday. In a statement on the decision, it did not specify the amount of planned U.S. investments in the TRIPP infrastructures.
Rubio and Mirzoyan signed the deal just days before Armenia’s parliamentary elections. The three main opposition groups challenging the ruling Civil Contract say that the TRIPP could endanger Armenia’s vital border with Iran. Some of their leaders have also said that it amounts to the kind of an extraterritorial corridor that has been sought by Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Amid its continuing conflict with the United States and Israel, Iran likewise reaffirmed last week its opposition to the transit arrangement which it fears could lead to U.S. security presence along its border with Armenia.
“Tehran harbors severe suspicion toward the malicious intentions of the United States … and we have explicitly declared our opposition to such a destabilizing presence,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told the ISNA news agency.
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