Turkey and Armenia will hold talks to normalize relations in Moscow

 

 Envoys from Turkey and Armenia will hold the first round of talks aimed at normalizing relations in Moscow on Friday, in a move Armenia expects to establish diplomatic relations and reopen borders after decades of hostility, Reuters reported.

Turkey and Armenia have not had diplomatic or trade ties for three decades, and negotiations are the first attempt to restore ties since the 2009 peace agreement. That agreement was never ratified and ties remained strained.

Neighbors are at odds over various issues, most notably the massacre in 1915 of 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

 Armenia says the 1915 killings were genocide. Turkey accepts that many Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War I, but disputes the figures and denies that the killings were systematically organized or genocide.

During the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2020, Ankara supported Azerbaijan and accused ethnic Armenian forces of occupying Azerbaijani territory. Turkey has begun calling for rapprochement after the conflict, as it seeks more influence in the region.

 The Russian news agency TASS quoted the Armenian Foreign Ministry, which said on Wednesday that Yerevan expected the latest talks to lead to the establishment of diplomatic relations and the opening of the border, which had been closed since 1993.

With closed borders, Turkey and Armenia have no trade routes. The smuggling trade has risen slightly since 2013, but is just $ 3.8 million by 2021, according to official Turkish data.

 Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, said in November that the opening of the border and the renewal of the railway lines between Turkey and Armenia would have economic benefits for Yerevan, so that the Russians could leave for Turkey. Iran and Azerbaijan.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoлуlu said last year that charter flights between Istanbul and Yerevan would be launched as part of the rapprochement, but that Turkey would coordinate all-out flights with Azerbaijan.

The flights should start at the beginning of February.