United States President Donald Trump has confirmed that he will host the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia for a “historic peace summit”.

Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, and Nikol Pashinyan, the prime minister of Armenia, will meet with Trump at the White House on Friday for an official “peace signing ceremony,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.

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“These two Nations have been at War for many years, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people. Many Leaders have tried to end the War, with no success, until now, thanks to ‘TRUMP,’” he wrote.

News of the talks in Washington was reported earlier this week when Pashinyan’s government announced the meeting in a statement on Telegram.

The two countries, former Soviet republics, have faced off over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh since the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.

The region, which was claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time.

The two sides fought a bloody war that lasted into the early 1990s, and the region has remained a major flashpoint ever since.

The conflict resumed in 2020 when Azerbaijan tried to retake Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia.

Azerbaijan recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, prompting almost all of the territory’s 100,000 Armenians to flee to Armenia.

The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan met in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, for peace talks last month, but no breakthrough in the decades-old conflict was announced.

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The Trump administration intensified its efforts to seek a resolution in March when the president dispatched his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region.

The prospective agreement could potentially put an end to decades of conflict and set the stage for a reopening of key transportation corridors across the South Caucasus that have been shut since the early 1990s.

US officials told The Associated Press news agency that the agreements included a major breakthrough establishing a key transit corridor across the region, which had been an obstacle in peace talks.

The agreement, according to the officials, would give the US leasing rights to develop the corridor and name it the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.

It would link Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan region, which is separated from the rest of the country by a 32-kilometre (20-mile) patch of Armenia’s territory.

The transit corridor is expected to eventually include a rail line, oil and gas lines, and fibre optic lines, allowing for the movement of goods and eventually people.