Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan met with U.S. Ambassador Kristina Kvien on Tuesday amid growing outrage over Washington’s proposal to lease a section of Armenia’s Syunik province for a corridor to Azerbaijan.
Though the Armenian government’s official readout described the meeting as a discussion on “regional developments” and “unblocking communication routes,” it comes just days after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan publicly confirmed that the U.S. offered to have an American company operate the corridor—and even floated a 100-year lease.
No mention was made of the lease in the statement, and the U.S. Embassy has so far remained silent. The deliberate vagueness of the readout has only intensified concerns that the Armenian government is downplaying the scope of the proposal as public scrutiny mounts.
Grigoryan’s meeting with Kvien follows a flurry of diplomatic activity triggered by Pashinyan’s remarks. Iran, which has warned repeatedly against any “extra-regional” presence in Syunik, dispatched Ambassador Mehdi Sobhani to meet with Grigoryan two days earlier. Pashinyan also spoke by phone with Iran’s newly elected president.
Opposition leaders slammed the government for quietly advancing the plan under the guise of economic cooperation, warning that the corridor would effectively erode Armenian sovereignty. They dismissed comments by Pashinyan’s spokeswoman rejecting Azerbaijani demands for extraterritorial access, saying the prime minister has already accepted the core premise by entertaining the U.S. lease.
