WASHINGTON — The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan shook hands as they joined President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday for a peace summit where they signed an agreement aimed at ending decades of conflict.

The two countries in the South Caucasus signed agreements with each other and the U.S. that will reopen key transportation routes while allowing the U.S. to seize on Russia’s declining influence in the region. The deal includes an agreement that will create a major transit corridor to be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, the White House said.

Trump said at the White House on Friday that naming the route after him was “a great honor for me” but “I didn’t ask for this.”

A senior administration official, on a call before the event with reporters, said it was the Armenians who suggested the name.

At the peace summit on Friday, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said the transit corridor will “create connectivity opportunities for so many countries.”

“We are starting the path toward strategic partnership,” he said.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called the agreement a “significant milestone.”

“We are laying a foundation to write a better story than the one we had in the past,” Pashinyan said.

Both leaders said the breakthrough was made possible by Trump and his team and joined a growing list of foreign leaders and other officials who have said the U.S. leader should receive a Nobel Peace Prize –something he has coveted.

“President Trump in six months did a miracle,” Aliyev said.

Trump remarked on how long the conflict went on between the two countries and said of the agreement, “Thirty-five years they fought and now they’re friends and they’re going to be friends a long time.”

That route will connect Azerbaijan and its autonomous Nakhchivan exclave, which are separated by a 20-mile-wide patch of Armenian territory. The demand from Azerbaijan had held up peace talks in the past.

Trump indicated he’d like to visit the route at some point, saying, “We’re going to have to get over there.”

“The roadmap they are agreeing to will build a cooperative future that benefits both countries, their region of the South Caucasus and beyond,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Friday. She added that the new transit corridor will “allow unimpeded connectivity between the two countries while respecting Armenia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and its people.”

Asked how he feels about lasting peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Trump said “very confident” as he welcomed both leaders to the White House on Friday afternoon.

Friday’s signing adds to the handful of peace and economic agreements brokered this year by the U.S., while Trump has made no secret of his wish to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in helping to ease long-running conflicts across the globe.

The peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda helped end the decadeslong conflict in eastern Congo, and the U.S. mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, while Trump intervened in clashes between Cambodia and Thailand by threatening to withhold trade agreements with both countries if their fighting continued. Yet peace deals in Gaza and Ukraine have been elusive.

The signing of a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, also strikes a geopolitical blow to their former imperial master, Russia. Throughout the nearly four-decade conflict, Moscow played mediator to expand its clout in the strategic South Caucasus region, but its influence waned quickly after it launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Trump-brokered deal would allow the U.S. to deepen its reach in the region as Moscow retreats, senior U.S. administration officials said.

The Trump administration began engaging with Armenia and Azerbaijan in earnest earlier this year, when Trump’s key diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Aliyev in Baku and started to discuss what a senior administration official called a “regional reset.”

Negotiations over who will develop the Trump Route — which will eventually include a rail line, oil and gas lines, and fiber optic lines — will likely begin next week, and at least nine developers have expressed interest already, according to the senior administration official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

Separate from the joint agreement, both Armenia and Azerbaijan signed deals with the United States meant to bolster cooperation in energy, technology and the economy, the White House said.

Trump previewed much of Friday’s plan in a social media post Thursday evening, in which he said the agreements would “fully unlock the potential” of the South Caucasus region.