It’s an open secret that Azerbaijan wields quasi veto power over Turkey’s ongoing efforts to normalize relations with their common neighbor Armenia. However, Baku’s ambassador to Ankara, Rashad Mammadov, laid out the situation in the bluntest terms in an interview with the pro-opposition Turkish daily Cumhuriyet this week.

Mammadov asserted that Turkey and Azerbaijan would reopen their land borders with Armenia only after Armenia holds a constitutional referendum to remove references in the Armenian Constitution's preamble, which Baku says contain territorial claims to Nagorno-Karabakh. Ankara supports this demand.

The mountainous enclave was majority Armenian until 2023, when Azerbaijan wrested it from Armenia in a lightning offensive that rights groups say amounted to ethnic cleansing.

Coming only weeks before Armenia’s June 7 parliamentary elections, which are being touted as a referendum on Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s pivot toward Ankara and Baku, Mammadov’s comments went down like a lead balloon. The Turkish government refrained from commenting, but the consensus within diplomatic circles is that the envoy overstepped boundaries by suggesting that his country got to dictate when and how Turkish Armenian relations would proceed.