The last time Turkey’s border with Armenia was open, Bill Clinton was the US president and Boris Yeltsin was his Russian counterpart. Jurassic Park was packing movie theaters, and the iPhone was more than a decade away.
So any plan to restore ties between the two marks a historic moment. On June 8, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan expressed confidence that Armenia and Turkey would soon achieve full normalization of relations and that tangible progress had already been made.
This follows Turkey’s decision in May to lift restrictions on bilateral trade with Armenia. Previously, goods shipped from Turkey to Armenia were first registered as exports to a third country and then re-exported to Armenia. New regulations will allow goods to be sent from Turkey to Armenia through a third country and in the opposite direction; the final destination or point of export can now be designated as “Armenia/Turkey”.
This is a notable change given the fact that diplomatic relations between the two countries ruptured in 1993 because of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war. Turkey stood by its Azerbaijani ally and closed the border. Despite a few diplomatic efforts in subsequent years, relations have remained limited.
Things began to change right after the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, when Baku regained some territory. Armenia felt betrayed by its supposed ally, Russia, which had refused to intervene, and sought to improve relations with Turkey. Rapprochement, it believed, would diversify Armenia’s economic dependence on Russia, and might also dilute the Ankara-Baku axis.
The process developed over the next few years, with Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan meeting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2022 and again last year.
Yet, the real acceleration in relations has come over the past few months, coinciding with the deterioration of Russo-Armenian relations. On March 11, Turkish Airlines launched direct flights on the Istanbul-Yerevan-Istanbul route. In April, a meeting of the working group on the restoration of the Gyumri-Kars railway was held in the Turkish city of Kars. On May 4, Pashinyan announced a deal to rebuild the medieval Ani border bridge, and on May 23, the opening of the Akhalkalaki (Georgia)–Kars (Turkey) railway for the supply of goods between Armenia and the European Union.
The momentum behind the ongoing rapprochement is expected to strengthen. That was underlined by June’s parliamentary elections in Armenia, where Pashinyan and his party, Civil Contract, took 64 seats in the 105-seat National Assembly. His electoral campaign was based on the idea of further expanding relations with neighbors, including Turkey and Azerbaijan, and potentially building deeper ties.
In a sign of the warming environment, Erdoğan congratulated Pashinyan on his election and added that the Armenian premier’s “vision of long-term peace and stability in the region and ensuring the necessary cooperation in this area will be successfully realized”. This contrasted with Russia’s reaction to the election results — Moscow offered no congratulations, signaling its unhappiness with the outcome and with Pashinyan’s policies.
The Armenian-Turkish rapprochement is therefore directly linked to Russia’s changing position in the South Caucasus. Since the all-out war in Ukraine began, Moscow’s power in the region has notably declined. China, the EU, the US, and, not least, Turkey, all have increased their economic and political engagement with the South Caucasus countries. Ankara is particularly successful given its geographic proximity and economic leverage. For Armenia, it offers an alternative trade route to Europe that does not pass through Georgia, to its north.
The pace of improving relations between Ankara and Yerevan will be contingent upon how quickly and efficiently Armenia and Azerbaijan improve their relationship and sign a comprehensive peace treaty settling all outstanding issues.
Yet, even if this is a slow process, the peace treaty is likely to be agreed, and will signal another major geopolitical development in a region when Russia’s once-close ally is diversifying its foreign policy and economic ties.
Ultimately, the war in Ukraine distracted the Kremlin. Armenia is not alone among Russia’s neighbors in using this moment to pursue alternatives to the old dependency.
Emil Avdaliani is a research fellow at the Turan Research Center and a professor of international relations at the European University in Tbilisi, Georgia. His research focuses on the history of silk roads and the interests of great powers in the Middle East and the Caucasus.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
