By Alexander Pracht
Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, held a rare meeting Tuesday on the sidelines of this year’s United Nations General Assembly to discuss ongoing efforts to normalize relations, the two leaders’ offices reported.
Pashinyan and Erdoğan reviewed “the steps already taken and the existing agreements reached,” referring to a breakthrough July 2022 deal to partially reopen the long-shuttered Armenia-Turkey border, the Armenian prime minister’s office said.
The leaders also discussed “regional issues,” the readout added, including the state of negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan toward a separate normalization deal.
For its part, Erdoğan’s office reported unspecified “significant progress…on the path to unconditional normalization between Türkiye and Armenia.”
Armenia and Turkey recognize each other but have never established diplomatic relations. Disputes include Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide and its critical assistance to Azerbaijan during the 2020 war in and around Nagorno-Karabakh.
Efforts to normalize relations took on a new life in late 2021, when Yerevan and Ankara appointed special envoys for talks, marking the first direct negotiations between Armenian and Turkish officials in more than a decade.
A few months later, envoys Ruben Rubinyan of Armenia and Serdar Kılıç of Turkey announced they had reached a landmark deal to open their two countries’ land border to citizens of third countries and holders of diplomatic passports. While the preliminary agreement suggested that the border be opened “at the earliest date possible,” the situation remains unchanged.
In fact, the border has opened only once since that agreement was reached, when Armenia sent aid trucks overland to Turkey following a disastrous earthquake last February that killed tens of thousands of people in southern Turkey and northern Syria.
Rubinyan and Kılıç last met in July in the village of Margara near the border to discuss the possibility of reopening a railroad connecting Armenia and Turkey, among other topics. There has been no movement on that issue since.
The two sides have also yet to resume aviation-related issues. Even though Yerevan and Ankara agreed to resume cargo flights in 2022, the Armenian investigative outlet Hetq reported in July that Turkey was continuing to ban Armenian cargo flights through its airspace, even for aircraft registered in third countries.
Pashinyan and Erdoğan have spoken or met only a handful of times before, mostly notably when the Armenian prime minister attended the Turkish president’s inauguration last June.
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