Official Calls for Careful Approach to Foreign Influence in Caucasus

Date: 10 August 2025 - 21:58

News ID: ۱۴۲۴۲۶

TEHRAN — Mehdi Sanai,
senior political advisor to President Masoud Pezeshkian, expressed Iran’s cautious stance on Sunday regarding the recent agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan to establish a transport corridor near the Iranian border.
While Sanai welcomed peace efforts and the reopening of regional transit routes, he emphasized Tehran’s concerns over the involvement of extra-regional powers in the South Caucasus.
“Iran supports peace among its neighbors and has no objection to lifting blockades on transit routes,” Sanai said in a post on the social media platform X. “However, we are sensitive to plans that bring foreign powers and organizations into the security and geopolitical framework of the historical Caucasus region and warn against the risk of escalating tensions through such maneuvers.”
Sanai’s remarks come in the wake of comments made on Saturday by Ali Akbar Velayati, senior advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who strongly condemned the so-called “Zangezur corridor” project. The corridor, intended to link Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan through Armenia, was granted to the United States under an agreement signed in Washington last week.
Velayati warned that the plan poses a serious threat to regional security, saying, “The security in the Southern Caucasus is at stake with the implementation of this plot. Iran has stressed that with or without Russia, it will act to preserve stability in the region.”
He further criticized the initiative as a vehicle for expanding U.S. and NATO influence near Iran’s northern borders and dismissed former U.S. President Donald Trump’s characterization of the corridor as a peace-building effort as “meaningless.” Velayati also argued that the corridor could lead to Armenia’s fragmentation and is opposed by many Armenians.