What this campaign was
Bilateral negotiation between Armenia and Azerbaijan since 2020, producing an agreed treaty text in March 2025 and a Washington declaration in August 2025. Signature remains conditional, delimitation has covered a small fraction of the border, and the transport question is unresolved.
This is the module's principal live diplomatic file and the one on which its Policy view turns. It is also the clearest case in Vigil of the distinction between an agreed text and a concluded settlement: everything about the situation is better than it was in 2020, and nothing about it is finished. How the transport chapter resolves will determine whether the region's connectivity changes materially or whether the closed borders persist as they have for thirty years.
Confidence: Moderate As of 2026-10-28Reviewed 2026-10-29
Summary
Since the November 2020 trilateral statement, Armenia and Azerbaijan have conducted a negotiation covering a peace treaty, border delimitation and the reopening of transport links. Mediation has shifted repeatedly — Russian, then EU and US, with periods of direct bilateral contact — and the parties have at times preferred formats that exclude one or another external actor. The substantive results to date are real and partial: the text of a peace treaty was agreed in March 2025; a first delimitation of about a dozen kilometres in the Tavush direction was completed in 2024, involving the transfer of four villages to Azerbaijani control; and a declaration was signed in Washington in August 2025. Signature of the treaty itself remains outstanding, with Azerbaijan conditioning it on Armenian constitutional amendment. The transport question — specifically any connection between Azerbaijan and its Nakhchivan exclave across southern Armenia — remains unresolved, with Armenia rejecting extraterritorial arrangements and Iran objecting to any change in the border configuration. The Armenia–Türkiye normalisation track runs in parallel with its own special representatives and has produced no border opening.
Stated objectives
What the participants say. Each entry cites where the position was stated; Vigil records that it was made, not that it is true.
Both parties state a peace treaty based on mutual recognition of territorial integrity within Soviet-era administrative borders as the objective, and both confirmed agreement on the text in March 2025.
Azerbaijan states that signature requires Armenian constitutional amendment removing what it describes as an implicit territorial claim.
Armenia states that any transport connection must operate under Armenian sovereignty and jurisdiction, contrasting reciprocal access with an extraterritorial corridor.
Assessed objectives
Vigil's reading, graded. Kept structurally apart from stated positions so an assessment can never be published as someone's declared aim.
The negotiation is asymmetric: Azerbaijan negotiates from military advantage and physical control, and delay costs it comparatively little, which shapes the pace more than any procedural factor.
The August 2025 Washington declaration is read by several analysts as reformulating the transport question in terms compatible with Armenian sovereignty, which would leave Iran's objection addressed rather than tested. Vigil records this as an assessment of a document whose full operational content is not public.
The Armenia–Türkiye track's dependence on this one is a matter of sequencing rather than of formal linkage, and neither Ankara nor Baku has stated a formal condition connecting them.
Supporting & external
- Turkish defence partnership with Azerbaijan External supporter · Confidence: Moderate · as of 2026-06
Azerbaijan's principal external partner, and the counterparty in the separate Armenia–Türkiye track.
Affected parties
- Armenian Armed Forces Affected party · Confidence: Moderate · as of 2026-06
Named as a party to the delimitation and incident-prevention elements. This is a negotiated process, not an engagement between the participants.
- Azerbaijani Armed Forces Affected party · Confidence: Moderate · as of 2026-06
- Russian peacekeeping contingent in Karabakh (2020–2024) Affected party · Confidence: High · as of 2024-06
Deployed under the arrangement that opened this track and withdrawn in 2024. Retained as a historical participant in the process.
The trilateral statement and the Russian-mediated period
The statement ending the 2020 war established peacekeepers, a corridor to Karabakh and a provision on unblocking transport links. Russian mediation dominated and produced limited movement.
Mediation moves west
EU and US formats gained ground as Russian capacity and credibility declined. The September 2023 events removed the territorial question from the agenda and changed what the negotiation was about.
Delimitation begins and a text is agreed
A first section of border was delimited in the Tavush direction, involving the transfer of four villages. Russian peacekeepers withdrew. The parties announced agreement on the text of a peace treaty in March 2025.
Washington, and the conditions that remain
A declaration was signed in Washington in August 2025 covering normalisation and transport. The transport strand then acquired instruments of its own: an Armenia–US implementation framework in January 2026 widening TRIPP's scope from road and rail to a multimodal programme, a framework agreement initialled in May and signed in June 2026 giving the route a development company and a term of years, and a US engineering survey of the alignment in July 2026. Nothing has been built. Treaty signature remains conditional on constitutional amendment — for which a drafting council is to produce a text by the end of 2026 and a referendum is slated for 2027 — and delimitation has not extended beyond the 2024 section. The period's other movement ran against the track rather than with it: in February 2026 a Baku court sentenced the former Karabakh leadership, five of them to life, and an appeal court upheld the verdicts in August.
The first anniversary, and what the method costs
A trilateral joint statement on 10 August 2026 recorded engineering surveys under way in Armenia, Azerbaijan's connecting highway and railway near completion, a US–Armenia agreement to form a TRIPP Development Company, support for an electricity transmission line through the route, US$201m granted to the Trans-Caspian Enterprise Fund, lifted Azerbaijani trade restrictions with nearly 60,000 tonnes moved through Azerbaijan to Armenia, a signed telecommunications agreement, and the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group. The treaty text remains initialled and unsigned. Ten days later the method's cost surfaced domestically: Pashinyan stated that on the agreed Alma-Ata baseline the Armenian-administered enclaves, including Tigranashen on the country's principal north–south road, are not Armenian territory — which is the transit question asked in the direction that costs Yerevan rather than the direction that pays it.
An inventory, a ratification, and the gates that did not open
The period in which the track's economic content advanced by instrument while its legal frame stood still. On 31 August 2026 the two leaders published in Bishkek the first joint inventory of what normalisation has produced — petroleum products moving to Armenia, third-country goods transiting Azerbaijan, trade relations established, the commissions meeting — without naming a signature date or the constitutional precondition. The transport strand then passed its Armenian legal gates in sequence: the Constitutional Court cleared the TRIPP framework agreement on 15 September, the Foreign Relations Committee approved the ratification bill on 21 October, and the National Assembly ratified it on 28 October by 63 votes to 32, the United States having completed its own procedures; a government working group examined design sites in Syunik on 22 October. Nothing has been built, no alignment is published, and no customs or jurisdiction text exists. On 14–15 October Yerevan proposed resolving the enclaves by an exchange of territories of equal size, delimitation first; Baku had not answered publicly. The parallel Armenia–Türkiye track is recorded here only for its state, not as part of this one: Armenia declared the rebuilt Margara checkpoint ready on 31 August after a ten-day humanitarian opening in June, and the border stayed closed to regular traffic on a Turkish decision still tied to this track. Azerbaijan's envoy restated on 3 October that removing the discrepancies between the agreement and Armenia's constitution is unavoidable. Ratification of a transit framework with a third state is not a step on the treaty's own five rungs, and the record keeps the two apart.
Outcome and present status
Ongoing and genuinely unresolved. The track has produced more than any comparable process in the region's recent history — an agreed text, a functioning delimitation mechanism, a signed declaration and the withdrawal of a third-party force — and has not produced a signed treaty, an open border or a transport agreement. The constitutional condition and the transport question are the two obstacles, and neither has an evident solution that both parties have accepted. Vigil records the process as live rather than as either succeeding or failing.
Observed adaptations
The parties have increasingly negotiated bilaterally, with external actors hosting rather than mediating, which is a change from the format that operated for the previous three decades.
Delimitation has proceeded by small sections with local implementation rather than by comprehensive agreement, which has proved workable where attempted and slow.
Political implications
The module's principal live file, and the one that determines whether the region's post-2023 configuration stabilises.
Economic implications
The transport chapter is the largest single economic variable in the region; its resolution or failure decides whether the closed borders persist.
Humanitarian implications
Detainees, the missing and return arrangements sit alongside this track rather than within it, and 2026 showed they can move against it: the former Karabakh leadership was tried, sentenced and had its appeals rejected while the treaty stood still, which converted the most negotiable-looking humanitarian file into a domestic legal fact Azerbaijan need not reopen.
Linked events
Locations
Places this module already publishes as map markers, listed because the campaign is about them. Not an operational area.
What remains unknown
- The agreed treaty text has not been published; this record describes it from the parties' characterisations rather than from the document.
- The full operational content of the August 2025 Washington declaration is not public, which is why assessments of what it settles are graded low.
- The content of the parallel Armenia–Türkiye special-representative talks is not published.
- Incident reporting along the undelimited border is provided by the parties and is not independently verified.
Readings the evidence also supports
- Azerbaijan's constitutional condition can be read as a genuine requirement for a durable treaty or as a mechanism for deferring signature while the current balance holds. Both are argued and the record supports each.
- The coupling of the Armenia–Türkiye track to this one can be read as Azerbaijani leverage, as Turkish domestic caution using Baku as cover, or as natural sequencing between related files. No formal linkage has been stated by any party, and this module keeps the two tracks separate for that reason.
Listed because the record's own assessment is not the only one its sources permit — not as a hedge on the assessment above.
Ratified on one side, unbuilt on both
Armenia's ratification of the TRIPP framework on 28 October 2026 moves the transport strand from signed to ratified on the Armenian side and decides nothing about alignment, finance or who administers the crossing. The observables are a published alignment, a first contract and a customs text; the risk the record carries is that ratification is read as the route.
Ratified on one side, unbuilt on both
Armenia's ratification of the TRIPP framework on 28 October 2026 moves the transport strand from signed to ratified on the Armenian side and decides nothing about alignment, finance or who administers the crossing. The observables are a published alignment, a first contract and a customs text; the risk the record carries is that ratification is read as the route.
The detainees, now that they are convicted
Sentencing in February 2026 and the rejection of the appeals in August moved this out of the negotiation and into Azerbaijani domestic law. Any release is now clemency rather than exchange, and nothing in the agreed instruments obliges it. Whether the file is named in the settlement at all is the observable.
Watch questions this campaign bears on
Standing analytical questions whose evidence runs through this campaign, each with its latest review. Derived from the Watch object, never restated here.
See the force running this in Explore Interactive: select this record and follow what connects to it.
Assessed as of — 2026-10-28 Last reviewed — 2026-10-29