Telecom Armenia and Azertelecom have signed agreements to route internet traffic through each other’s territories. According to RFE/RL, the agreement would allow Azerbaijan to provide its exclave Nakhchivan with internet connectivity using Armenian infrastructure.

The agreements were announced on Monday afternoon, with both companies issuing statements saying that the agreement provides for the transmission and transit of internet through their respective countries on a commercial basis.

In nearly identical statements, Telecom Armenia and Azertelecom said that it was expanding the number and geography of countries supplying international internet traffic, ‘ensuring transit to Azerbaijan through its own infrastructure’.

According to RFE/RL, Telecom Armenia has not specified how much it will receive in exchange for Azertelecom using its infrastructure. Additionally, the outlet cited the company’s deputy director Aram Barseghyan as saying that Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) must first greenlight the agreement before its implementation.

Barseghyan also clarified that connections would be made in Kornidzor and Yeraskh. Kornidzor is located in eastern Armenia, near the border with Azerbaijan and the Lachin region. Yeraskh is located in western Armenia, near the border with Turkey and Nakhchivan. He also added that the Azerbaijani side will not connect to Armenia’s network or data, but would only be able to use its cables with a speed of 100 gigabits per second.

‘The cable does not enter Armenia, but at the border, as it is with Georgia, Turkey, and Iran’, Barseghyan told RFE/RL. ‘Everyone brings their own cable, a cable is laid right on the border, and it goes from point A to point B’.

‘There is no internet, it’s just a transit channel through which they use their internet […] We don’t sell them any Armenian goods, we don’t sell them anything from Armenia, we give them the opportunity through our channel, as it were, to get from point A to point B, so that they can go from Nakhchivan to Azerbaijan and vice versa’, Barseghyan added, noting it was a ‘very big strategic advantage’.

Barseghyan further noted that the telecommunications agreement was made ‘according to TRIPP logic’, but that it was not directly part of the project itself.

TRIPP, or the Trump Route, is a major infrastructure project agreed upon by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the US that would connect Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan through Armenian territory. The project entails major infrastructure work, including power lines and gas pipelines.

A digital security expert who wished to remain anonymous explained to OC Media that internet service providers run data through international routes — or other countries.

‘If someone’s internet traffic runs through your ISP, you can indeed spy on it. Not the “I read your Signal messages’ kind, but more of the “I know how much you use Facebook” kind’, they explained.

The expert noted, however, that Armenia already routes its traffic through other countries, as ‘nobody exists in a vacuum’.

‘These changes are mostly benign, but sometimes really bad. Ukraine routed a lot of its traffic via Russia 10 years ago’, they added.

Amidst online debate on what security ramifications such an agreement could have for either country, geopolitical analyst Dionis Cenușa wrote on X that ‘the more linkages are established, the less likely conflicts will emerge between interconnected sides’.

‘That’s the formula that made the EU a peaceful project and protected Europe from wars among the nations that formed the bloc’, he wrote.

‘Despite this step’s significance for normalisation, Armenia has to understand that Azerbaijan remains a regime with autocratic tendencies’, he continued, adding that Armenia was surrounded by other states ‘with autocratic tendencies’.

‘Indeed, establishing lasting peace is crucial for the region’s stability and prosperity, but Armenia requires diversification and interconnectedness’, Cenușa continued.