By Steve Holland
(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump will host the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan for peace talks at the White House on Friday, a U.S. official told Reuters.
The official said it was possible that the framework for a peace agreement could be announced at Friday’s meeting. The Washington Post was first to report on the talks.
The two countries, both of which won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, have been at loggerheads since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh – an Azerbaijani region that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population – broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.
Azerbaijan retook Karabakh in 2023, prompting 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.
In March, the two sides said they had agreed on the text of a draft peace agreement, but progress since then has been sporadic and slow. The countries’ leaders met in July in Abu Dhabi for talks.
(Reporting by Steve Holland, additional reporting by Costas Pitas and Christian Martinez, editing by Ross Colvin and Lincoln Feast)
