Armenia ready for talks with Turkey to repair relations: Pashinian

Armenia said Wednesday that the country was prepared to hold discussions on repairing relations with Turkey.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said that recent comments from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan represented an "opportunity for a conversation on settling relations."

"We stand ready for such a discussion," he told a Cabinet meeting.

Erdoğan said last month that Ankara was willing to work toward normalizing ties with Armenia if Yerevan "declares its readiness to move in this direction."

Armenia and Turkey never established diplomatic ties and their shared border has been closed since the 1990s.

Their relationship has deteriorated more recently over Turkey's support for Azerbaijan, which fought a brief war with Armenia last year and liberated the Armenian occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region and adjacent areas.

The resulting six-week war between Armenia and Turkey's ally Azerbaijan claimed some 6,500 lives. Russia brokered a cease-fire that saw Yerevan cede swathes of territory it had illegally occupied for decades.

Pashinian Wednesday stressed the importance of opening regional transport links, saying, "it is about transforming our region into a crossroad linking west and east and north and south."

In 2009, Armenia and Turkey signed an agreement to normalize relations, which would have led to the opening up of their shared border.

Yerevan has never ratified the agreement, and in 2018, ditched the process.