A senior adviser to U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff met with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in Yerevan on Wednesday for talks that focused on the planned creation of a U.S.-run transit corridor passing through Armenia.
The Armenian government gave few details of Pashinian’s talks with Aryeh Lightstone. It said they discussed unspecified “issues related to the implementation” of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) project. The TRIPP would run along Armenia’s border with Iran and connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave and Turkey.
The two men expressed confidence that “as a result of the resolution of technical issues, practical steps in that direction will be even more visible in the near future,” the government said in a statement. It did not elaborate.
Lighthouse held a separate meeting with Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan earlier in the day. According to the Armenian Foreign Ministry, they both “emphasized their interest in implementing the project on the ground in the shortest possible time frame.” The U.S. Embassy in Yerevan issued no statement on the talks as of Wednesday evening.
Lighthouse was accompanied by Konstantin Sokolov, a Russian-born American entrepreneur who was recently appointed by the U.S. State Department as chairman of a $200 million fund tasked with facilitating the TRIPP. Sokolov has business interests in Armenia that include a major stake in one of the country’s three mobile phone operators.
A U.S.-Armenian agreement signed in early June calls for the creation of a joint venture that will manage for at least 49 years a railway, a road, energy supply lines and other infrastructure to be built along the corridor. The U.S. government will own 74 percent of the TRIPP Development Company (TDC) that will receive “exclusive land use rights, development rights, related permissions, and all other rights” necessary for the transit arrangement.
Iran remains opposed to the TRIPP, fearing that it could lead to U.S. security presence along the Armenian-Iranian border and undermine Armenian control of it. The Iranian ambassador to Armenia indicated on July 8 that Yerevan has still not addressed Tehran’s “very legitimate and logical” concerns. Pashinian made clear the following day that he remains committed to implementing the TRIPP project “as soon as possible.”
“We are ready to provide answers to all the questions preoccupying [Iran] so that all fears are dispelled,” he told reporters on July 30.
Levon Zurabian, an Armenian opposition leader who visited Tehran recently, said on July 26 that Iranian officials remain “very negative about the TRIPP.” Zurabian cited the unnamed officials as warning that “if we see it as a threat to our national security we will act the way we do in the Persian Gulf.”
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