Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said Friday that she would travel to Armenia on Saturday, which recently faced violent clashes on its border with Azerbaijan.
“Tomorrow we are going to visit Armenia,” Ms. Pelosi said, answering a question to that effect during a press conference held on the occasion of the two-day meeting of the speakers of the G7 parliaments, in Berlin.
She refused to “give more details about the visit” for security reasons, stating that the Armenians had made an invitation a long time ago. Nancy Pelosi added that the visit was taking place under the sign of “respect for human rights and respect for the dignity of each person”.
Joe Biden was the first sitting US president to call the death of one and a half million Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 a “genocide”, angering Turkey.
The US official’s visit will come as more than 200 people have died in recent fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops, with both sides blaming each other for the clashes. These clashes erupted on Tuesday and ended in international mediation on Thursday night.
This is an unprecedented escalation since 2020 threatening to torpedo a fragile peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, two rival countries in the Caucasus.
Caucasian neighbors have fought two wars — in 2020 and in the 1990s — over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan.
Pelosi had been at the center of geopolitical tensions between China and the United States in August, when she traveled to Taiwan in defiance of warnings from Beijing which claims the island.