14:46,

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 14, ARMENPRESS. By starting dialogue with Turkey, Armenia doesn’t abandon its key state interests, and the establishment of relations cannot be accompanied by any preconditions, the head of the parliamentary committee on foreign relations Eduard Aghajanyan told reporters.

“In the context of relations with Turkey, Armenia’s stance has always been that we are ready to start the relations without any preconditions both from the Armenian side and the opposite,” he said.

Aghajanyan assures that the Armenian side is not abandoning anything, and this process is about the relations between Armenia and Turkey, about starting diplomatic relations. “This doesn’t anyhow mean that Armenia is abandoning its key state interests. On the contrary, we are convinced that establishing diplomatic relations with Turkey stems from Armenian state interests for various reasons,” the MP said.

He said that both Armenia and Turkey will benefit from this.

“Armenia has neighbors whom it can’t avoid geographically, and our neighbors can’t avoid our presence in this region. Therefore, there simply is no alternative to establishing good-neighborly relations with neighboring states. Indeed, this process isn’t easy given the regional processes of the last 30 years, but we are willing to take this path. And we will do everything for this process stemming from the Armenian interests to become reality,” he said.

He noted that over the last 30 years, Turkey was the one who was always pulling the plug on the process by bringing forward preconditions associated with the Artsakh conflict.