Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will visit Turkey this week for talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the first formal meeting of its kind between the historically hostile neighbors who share a common border with Iran.
Pashinyan confirmed that he would travel to Turkey on Friday at Erdogan’s invitation.
Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan called the planned meeting between the two leaders “historic.”
The two countries have no diplomatic relations and their land border has remained sealed since 1993 by Turkey in a gesture of solidarity with Azerbaijan. Pashinyan traveled to Turkey to attend the 2023 inauguration ceremony for Erdogan when he was reelected for a second term.
The two countries embarked on a normalization effort in January 2022, the second such attempt since 2009, when the United States and Switzerland mediated an accord only for Turkey to shelve it under intense pressure from Azerbaijan. Little tangible progress has been made, with the border still formally sealed and diplomatic relations unestablished despite a slew of concessions by Pashinyan to Azerbaijan and Turkey alike, including assurances that the 1915 genocidal slaughter of over a million Armenians by Ottoman forces would no longer be allowed to cloud relations with Ankara. Turkey made it clear from the start that progress in the normalization process would be tied to that achieved in peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
But the conflict between Iran and Israel may be shifting Ankara’s calculus amid fears of its spillover effects, including a mass influx of Iranian refugees and ethnic separatism among Iran’s Kurdish, Baloch and Azeri minorities. Armenia shares those concerns and Pashinyan, who faces reelection next year, is facing mounting criticism over his perceived failure to bolster his country's security amid continued threats from Turkey's top regional ally Azerbaijan. Erdogan is throwing something of a lifeline to him.
Coming just days after Israel went to war against Iran — decapitating its military leadership in a series of lightning strikes — Erdogan's invitation may also be meant to signal Turkey’s unease to Baku over its deepening ties with the Jewish state, speculated Western diplomatic sources speaking on background to Al-Monitor. Azerbaijan has leveraged its proximity to Israel to sponsor deconfliction talks between the latter and Turkey. Relations between Turkey and Israel have hit an all-time low over Gaza and the two countries are now butting heads in Syria. Azerbaijan has a vested interest in smoothing their relationship because Israel is among the top buyers of its oil, which is pumped through a pipeline that runs to export terminals on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.
Erdogan has come under intense pressure from his pious base to turn off the spigot, but the flow continues.
Baku’s mediation role began in 2020, when Israel alongside Turkey helped Azerbaijan wrest back all the land occupied by Armenia in a conflict in the early 1990s and is widely known to use the former Soviet state to spy on Iran.
Israel’s dizzying successes against Iran revealed the extent to which its Mossad spy agency has managed to penetrate Iran and its regime. Iran has a 689-kilometer (428-mile) border with Azerbaijan that is interrupted by a 44-kilometer (27-mile) portion that it shares with Armenia. The Turkic Azeris constitute Iran’s largest ethnic minority and even though they are better integrated than most, Iran accuses Israel of using its foothold in Azerbaijan to stoke ethnic separatism among them, but has produced little evidence to back those claims.
Yerevan and Tehran have long accused Azerbaijan of seeking to seize the parts of Armenia that border Iran under the guise of creating a corridor that would connect it to Nakhichevan, a Soviet-era exclave that borders Turkey and is formally part of Azerbaijan. There are mounting fears that Azerbaijan may seize on Iran’s plight to move on the region known as Syunik. Part of Pashinyan’s rationale in so arduously courting Ankara was to inoculate his country against further attacks by Azerbaijan. Iran remains Armenia’s closest regional ally, albeit an increasingly toothless one.
As such, peace with Turkey has become even more critical for the landlocked nation of 3 million, whose traditional mentor, Russia, has since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict tilted toward Azerbaijan.
