July 11, 2022

President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the recent NATO summit.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan exchanged a rare phone call on Monday, during which they called, according to Yerevan, for easing relations between their long-time sworn enemy countries.

In a statement, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said that MM. Erdogan and Pashinyan had agreed on the importance of a bilateral process to normalize relations.

This talk comes as Ankara and Yerevan have succeeded in the 1st July a diplomatic breakthrough: they agreed to allow the direct transport of goods by air between their countries and to open the crossing of their common land borders to citizens of third countries.

The two leaders hope that the July 1 agreements will be implemented in the near future, Armenian diplomacy said on Monday.

The two countries do not ;have never formally established diplomatic ties and their common border has been closed since the 1990s, forcing trucks to transit through Georgia or Iran.

Armenians estimate that one and a half million of their people were systematically killed during the First World War by the troops of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey, from the dismantling of the empire in 1920, recognizes massacres, but rejects the term genocide, evoking a civil war in Anatolia, coupled with a famine, in which 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and as many Turks are dead.

Armenia's defeat in Nagorny-Karabakh after six weeks of war in November 2020, in favor of Turkey's ally Azerbaijan , however, now makes possible a rapprochement between Yerevan and Ankara.

This improvement is strongly desired by Armenia, in the grip of economic difficulties, and encouraged by its Russian ally.

On January 14, special envoys, Serdar Kiliç on the Turkish side, and Ruben Rubinyan for Armenia, met in Mosc Where. The following month, commercial flights resumed between the two countries, the first in two years.