Image source: topwar.ru
Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Turkey and Armenia on March 12 in Antalya
The Turkish TV channel A Haber reports, citing a source in the Turkish Foreign Ministry, that regular talks between Yerevan and Ankara may take place in the near future. It is highly likely that in September the delegations of the two countries will hold a meeting on the territory of Turkey. The Turkish Foreign Ministry believes that it is impractical to organize a meeting in third countries.
— a source in the Turkish Foreign Ministry said, calling the negotiation process fragile.
This will be the fifth meeting at which, like the previous ones, issues of normalization of relations between the two countries will be discussed. The first talks on this topic took place in January in Moscow. They were very successful, according to their results, in particular, it was decided to resume flights between Armenia and Turkey. Air traffic was interrupted in 2020, flights were resumed in February of this year. The remaining four rounds of negotiations were held in Vienna.
Following the results of the previous negotiations, the parties agreed to open the land border between Armenia and Turkey in the near future for crossing by third-country nationals arriving in transit to neighboring states.
— the Turkish Foreign Ministry reported on the results of the fourth summit.
The border between Turkey and Armenia was closed on Ankara's initiative in 1993. The main reason for the differences between the neighboring countries is Ankara's support for the Azerbaijani position on the Karabakh issue and Turkey's negative attitude to the process of international recognition of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire.
In 2009, in Zurich, the Foreign Ministers of the two states signed protocols on the principles of settlement of border relations, but these documents were not ratified by the parties. In March 2018, Armenia announced the annulment of the protocols. In 2021, both countries appointed special representatives for the settlement of bilateral relations.
In recent days, the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh on the demarcation line, where Russian peacekeepers are located, has escalated again. Russia acts as a guarantor in the trilateral agreement between the Russian Federation, Armenia and Azerbaijan on the settlement of the Karabakh problem. Given the special operation in Ukraine, Moscow is now least interested in the emergence of a new hotbed of tension near its borders. It is possible that, taking into account the rapprochement between Russia and Turkey, Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the issue of further reconciliation of Ankara and Yerevan with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Apparently, very successfully.
