Armenia’s Economy Minister Vahan Kerobyan announced that cargo flights from Turkey would start “in the near future,” in line with normalization efforts that resumed early this year following more than a decadelong pause. Kerobyan told a local TV channel this week that once Armenia’s land border with Turkey is opened to trade, Armenia’s economy would grow by 30% in “just two to three years.”

Kerobyan’s bullish comments follow the first substantial steps that were agreed upon during the meeting held in Vienna on July 1 between Armenia’s special envoy for normalization with Turkey Rubin Rubenyan and his Turkish counterpart Serdar Kilic. In that meeting, the parties agreed to open their long-sealed land border to third-country nationals and start the direct transportation of goods between Armenia and Turkey.

Armenia had been pressing Turkey to let diplomatic passport holders through as a first confidence-building measure, but Ankara refused. So Yerevan came up with the idea of allowing those carrying foreign passports to come through, ostensibly to promote cross-border tourism.

The stated objective of the talks launched at the start of this year is to establish full-fledged diplomatic ties and fully open the border. The frontier was shuttered by Turkey in 1993 when Armenia occupied large chunks of Azerbaijan in a bloody war over the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.