“Earlier the start of the process was expected before the end of the current year; according to the latest information it is planned for 2027”, Bayramov said, in Interfax's account, adding that the main negotiations run between the United States and Armenia and that Baku is kept informed regularly, since the project cannot proceed without Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has already begun rebuilding the railway inside Nakhchivan, he said, and international partners have shown interest in taking part.
The dates on the record before Wednesday were softer. On 23 August, at the Azerbaijan-Uzbekistan intergovernmental council in Tashkent, Aliyev said work was under way on Armenian territory and that, as the American partners had told him, construction there would begin “either at the end of this year or at the beginning of next”. On 25 June Pashinyan told a briefing that the process was moving and that, technical problems permitting, Armenia wanted construction to start in 2026.
The slip lands in a week Yerevan has spent on the same route from the other end. On Wednesday afternoon a National Assembly deputy did not rule out “a certain deviation from the logic of the delimitation agreement” in connection with TRIPP, Armenpress reported at 15:14; the deputy's name was not captured in the desk's read and the sentence is carried as Armenpress printed it. The same afternoon Sargis Khandanyan, who chairs the assembly's foreign relations committee, said the constitution is no obstacle to signing the peace agreement with Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan has already begun rebuilding the railway inside Nakhchivan, he said, and international partners have shown interest in taking part.
Pashinyan spent Wednesday evening at the Élysée. The readout News.am carried at 23:29 lists the space summit that occasioned the visit, economic diversification as a priority of the strategic partnership, satisfaction that work on the Bargushat tunnel “has entered a substantive phase” and the importance of starting construction as soon as possible, and “regional processes” in one sentence about steps toward peace. TRIPP is not in it.
What moves in the meantime is Baku's fuel. On 5 September 16 wagons with 977 tonnes of diesel left Balajary for the Georgian border, taking the running total to about 16,000 tonnes of diesel and 5,000 of petrol since the route opened, by APA's count. That traffic runs by rail through Georgia. TRIPP's published purpose is the link between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan.
The court date is the next fixed point. The Constitutional Court takes up TRIPP on 15 September; the Kremlin, which booked Pashinyan for Moscow on Monday without a date, has said the referendum he dropped in Bishkek will be on the table there. Bayramov's 2027 puts the first physical work after both.