By Nailia Bagirova
BAKU (Reuters) -Azerbaijan has removed all restrictions on cargo transit to Armenia, President Ilham Aliyev said on Tuesday, in a sign of warming ties between the former foes following nearly four decades of conflict.
Aliyev told Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at a meeting in Astana that a shipment of Kazakh grain via Azerbaijan to Armenia marked the first such consignment since transit was halted in the final years of the Soviet Union, when war initially broke out between the two neighbours.
“I think this is also a good indicator that peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia is no longer on paper, but in practice,” Aliyev was quoted by Azerbaijani state media as saying.
Hikmet Hajiyev, Aliyev’s foreign policy aide, told Reuters that the cargo shipments would travel to Armenia via Georgia, calling the transit “an economic benefit of peace”.
A spokeswoman for Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan hailed Aliyev’s move as a “step of great importance for opening regional communications, strengthening mutual trust, and institutionalising the peace established between Armenia and Azerbaijan”.
Armenia and Azerbaijan were locked in bitter conflict from the late 1980s over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region within Azerbaijan that had enjoyed de facto independence for three decades until Baku took back full control in 2023.
The neighbours reached a U.S.-brokered peace agreement in August, but major hurdles remain to its formal signing, including a demand by Azerbaijan that Armenia change its constitution.
The peace deal has the potential to transform the South Caucasus, an oil- and gas-rich region and a key transit route connecting Asia and Europe that has gained salience since the war in Ukraine largely shut down trade routes via Russia for European markets.
A planned strategic transit corridor, to be developed exclusively by the United States, is also expected to boost energy exports and bilateral economic ties between Baku and Yerevan.
(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova in Baku; writing by Lucy Papachristou in Tbilisi; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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