Record / E-2026-0045
Armenia and Azerbaijan sign a joint declaration and initial a peace treaty that remains unsigned a year later
At a White House summit on August 8, 2025, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia signed a Joint Declaration with Trump signing as a witness, and their foreign ministers initialed a draft peace treaty. Trump said: We have a very comprehensive agreement. It's a peace agreement. And this isn't cease-fire. This isn't we'll hold off. This is a peace agreement. Aliyev said today we initialed the peace deal. One year later, in a trilateral joint statement of August 10, 2026, the three governments still described the treaty as a draft that was initialed. It has not been signed or ratified, and the border has remained quiet throughout.
Context
This entry is recorded as a peace agreement claim rather than a ceasefire claim because the subject expressly disclaimed the ceasefire framing in the transcript this entry cites. The gap the record shows is between the characterization and the instrument. What was signed was a Joint Declaration, with the President of the United States signing as a witness to the other two leaders; the peace treaty itself was initialed by the two foreign ministers, and initialing authenticates a negotiated text without creating a binding obligation. A year on, the parties' own trilateral statement still calls it a draft. Azerbaijan has conditioned signature on an Armenian constitutional change: Aliyev said on August 27, 2025 that a formal peace agreement would be signed once a provision he described as a territorial claim is removed, and on February 14, 2026 that there will be no signing of a peace agreement until it is. That condition remains unmet. Against that, the outcome the record supports most clearly is the quiet: Aliyev said in February 2026 that in more than six months there had been no more shootings, no victims, no wounded on the border with Armenia, and the trilateral statement of August 2026 records that stability along the border was maintained. The declaration also established a transit route across Armenian territory which Trump said could extend for up to 99 years.
Sources
The document identifier is the citation. The URL is a resolution mechanism, and the archived copy is what the citation resolves to when the live link dies.
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Remarks Prior to a Signing Ceremony With President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia and an Exchange With Reporters
DCPD-202500838, August 8, 2025
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Joint Statement of the United States, Armenia, and Azerbaijan on the One-Year Anniversary of the White House Peace Summit
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan, No. 334/26, August 10, 2026
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Ilham Aliyev interviewed by France 24 in Munich
President of Azerbaijan, article 71602, February 14, 2026
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Ilham Aliyev interview to Al Arabiya
President of Azerbaijan, article 69968, August 27, 2025