Washington Joint Declaration (Trump–Aliyev–Pashinyan) §

What was signed

The 8 August 2025 Joint Declaration is a three-page political document, not a peace treaty. It records four commitments:

1. The parties initialled the agreed text of an Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and Inter-State Relations. Initialling is a procedural step short of signature; the agreement remains pending domestic constitutional procedures, in particular the Azerbaijani precondition that Armenia amend its constitution to remove a preamble reference to the 1990 Declaration of Independence (which itself references the 1989 joint Armenian-Karabakh resolution).
2. The parties jointly requested the OSCE Chair-in-Office to initiate closure of the OSCE Minsk Process and its related structures. This commitment was operationalised in the OSCE Ministerial Council decision of 1 September 2025.
3. The parties signed bilateral economic cooperation agreements with the United States covering trade, transit, energy, infrastructure and technology.
4. Armenia agreed to work with the United States and "mutually determined third parties" on the framework for the "Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity" (TRIPP) — a US-mediated connectivity-and-transit project across southern Armenia linking Azerbaijan proper to its Nakhichevan exclave. TRIPP is presented as an alternative to the Azerbaijani-Turkish demand for an extra-territorial "Zangezur corridor" that Yerevan rejected after 2020.

What it does and does not resolve

The declaration does not address the rights of the Karabakh-Armenian community displaced in September–October 2023, nor the status of the eight Armenian political-prisoner trials underway in Baku of former Karabakh leaders, nor the cases pending at the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. Armenian-American organisations and the Armenian opposition criticised the declaration on these grounds; the Armenian Weekly editorial of 7 September 2025 argued that the simultaneous closure of the Minsk Process removed the only multilateral mechanism through which Armenian-side claims about the 2023 displacement and prisoners could continue to be heard. sourced opinion

The Azerbaijani government and the Trump administration framed the declaration as a final peace settlement; that framing is not supported by the text, which describes the agreement as initialled rather than signed and conditions full effect on subsequent constitutional procedures. The atlas treats the document as a major political milestone, the first joint trilateral framework on the conflict at the level of heads of state, but not as a closed peace settlement.