Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held a meeting as the latter visited Istanbul for groundbreaking talks on Friday.
The discussions began shortly before 7:00 p.m. (1600 GMT) at Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace, the Presidency said.
Armenia and Türkiye have never established formal diplomatic ties and their shared border has been closed since the 1990s.
Analysts said Pashinyan would make the case for speeding up steps toward normalization with Türkiye in a bid to ease Armenia’s isolation.
Ahead of the talks, Pashinyan visited the Armenian Patriarchal Church and the Blue Mosque and met members of the Turkish Armenian community, he said on his official Facebook page.
Normalization
“This is a historic visit, as it will be the first time a head of the Republic of Armenia visits Türkiye at this level. All regional issues will be discussed,” Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonyan told reporters on Thursday.
“The risks of war (with Azerbaijan) are currently minimal, and we must work to neutralize them. Pashinyan’s visit to Türkiye is a step in that direction.”
An Armenian foreign ministry official told AFP Pashinyan and Erdoğan would discuss efforts to sign a comprehensive peace treaty as well as the fallout from the Iran-Israel conflict.
A day ahead of his visit, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was in Türkiye to meet Erdoğan, hailing the two nations’ alliance as “a significant factor, not only regionally but also globally.”
Erdoğan repeated his backing for “the establishment of peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia.”
The two nations had agreed on the text of a peace deal in March, but Azerbaijan has since outlined a host of demands, including changes to Armenia’s constitution, before it will sign the document.
Pashinyan has actively sought to normalize relations with both Baku and Ankara.
“Pashinyan is very keen to break Armenia out of its isolation and the best way to do that is a peace agreement with Azerbaijan and a normalization agreement with Turkey,” Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe told AFP.
The main thing blocking normalization with Türkiye was Azerbaijan, a close ally of Ankara, he said.
“Turkey has a strategic dilemma here: on the one hand it wants to stay loyal to Azerbaijan; on the other, opening the Armenian border makes it a bigger player in the South Caucasus,” he said.
Earlier this year, Pashinyan said Armenia would halt its campaign for international recognition of the 1915 mass killings of Armenians as genocide.
He has visited Türkiye only once before, for Erdoğan’s 2023 inauguration. At the time, he was one of the first foreign leaders to congratulate him on his re-election.
Ankara and Yerevan appointed special envoys in late 2021 to lead a normalization process, a year after Armenia’s defeat in a war with Azerbaijan over the then-disputed Karabakh region.
In 2022, Türkiye and Armenia resumed commercial flights after a two-year pause.
A previous attempt to normalize relations, a 2009 accord to open the border, was never ratified by Armenia and abandoned in 2018.
