Why Artsakh Was Given to Azerbaijan as a Bonus

Former ambassador Dziunik Aghajanian makes a sharp claim in this clip: the transit route the United States calls TRIPP (Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity), and which Turkey and Azerbaijan call the Zangezur Corridor, was conceived from the start as a connecting link between Turkey and Azerbaijan. In her reading, the purpose was never Armenian economic benefit. It was to move weaponry and manpower into position for military action against Iran launched from the north, through Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) territory now occupied by Azerbaijan.

She goes further, saying Artsakh was “given to Azerbaijan as a bonus” for its commitments to this plan. That framing ties together several threads the hosts and Aghajanian return to throughout the episode: the September 2023 loss of Artsakh, which ethnically cleansed more than 150,000 Armenian inhabitants, and the broader regional project she believes is still moving forward. For her, the naming matters. She rejects the idea that TRIPP and the Zangezur Corridor are neutral synonyms, treating them as the same scheme dressed in different language.

This reframes the TRIPP from a transit project usually sold as commerce into a military logistics question with direct consequences for Armenian sovereignty and for Iran’s northern border. Aghajanian ties the urgency of the project to a coming operation she expects, and she argues the plan has “gone nowhere” in the sense that it was never abandoned, only reshaped and repackaged. Whether listeners accept her conclusion or not, she compresses a controversial geopolitical argument which connects the fate of Artsakh, the role of Turkey and Azerbaijan, and the strategic stakes around Iran into a single pointed statement.