Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has announced he will meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a rare bilateral format set to take place in Turkey on June 20, Pashinyan hopes to mend strained relations with Turkey and reopen their shared land border.
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Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan stated that this "historic" visit marks the first time Pashinyan will participate in such high-level meetings in Turkey. He added that the meeting will partly aim to eliminate the risk of fresh fightings with Azerbaijan.
Discussions may also touch upon the Iran-Israel conflict and the evacuation of foreign citizens from Iran, which borders both states.
Pashinyan is actively seeking to normalize relations with Ankara and Baku. Earlier this year, he said that Armenia would no longer push for international recognition of the mass killing of Anatolia's Armenian population as genocide.
Armenia also wishes to reopen the Turkish border, and for this reason, renovated a crossing point last year.
A day before Pashinyan's visit, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will also visit Turkey to meet with Erdogan.
Armenia and Turkey do not have diplomatic relations. The neighboring countries hold differing views on a number of issues, including the events of 1915. Specifically, Armenia, like many Western states, recognizes the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide. Turkey does not agree with this assessment. Furthermore, Turkey is a close ally of Azerbaijan – in 1993, during the Nagorno-Karabakh War, Turkey closed its land border with Armenia in support of Azerbaijan. This border was only reopened 30 years later, in February 2023, to deliver humanitarian aid during the devastating earthquake in Turkey.
Turkey also supported Azerbaijan during the 44-day Karabakh War in 2020.
The normalization of relations between the countries began in 2021. In March 2022, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan visited the Diplomatic Forum in Antalya, marking the first visit by a high-ranking Armenian official to Turkey in decades. In October of the same year, Nikol Pashinyan and Recep Tayyip Erdogan met face-to-face in Prague. Pashinyan also attended Erdogan's inauguration in Turkey in 2023.
