A few days after the Armenian Prime Minister visited the Turkish-Armenian border, a Turkish diplomatic source said the two countries would resume talks to normalize ties near the same location.
Special representatives from Türkiye and Armenia will hold a new round of talks, the source said on Monday, resuming efforts to end years of animosity after a two-year pause in negotiations.
Ankara had severed diplomatic and commercial relations with Armenia in 1993 in support of Azerbaijan over Armenia's illegal occupation of the Karabakh region. Since the conflict ended, NATO member Türkiye has also been working to revive its historically strained ties with Armenia, though it has said any normalization with Yerevan depended on the progress in its peace talks with Azerbaijan.
Notable representatives from Türkiye and Armenia have so far held four rounds of talks and the Turkish source said a fifth round would be held along the Turkish-Armenian border on Tuesday. "During the meeting, developments will be reviewed by the special representatives and certain confidence-building steps that may be implemented between the two countries will be discussed," the source said. A spokesperson for the Armenian Foreign Ministry confirmed the meeting on the social media platform X. The last official meeting between both countries' officials was held in July 2022, but the two representatives also met on the sidelines of a diplomacy forum in southern Türkiye earlier this year.
Türkiye and Armenia are at odds primarily over the 1.5 million people Yerevan says were killed in 1915 during the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor to modern Türkiye, and Armenian atrocities in Azerbaijan. Türkiye refuses this claim of "genocide" and urges Yerevan to leave the matter to historians while highlighting that the Armenian diaspora influential in Europe and the United States is poisoning ties between the two countries over the issue.
