By Mark Dovich
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will attend newly reelected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s inauguration Saturday in Ankara, marking the first visit by an Armenian leader to the country in over a decade.
“Armenia received an invitation to participate in the inauguration ceremony of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,” Pashinyan’s office said in a short statement Friday to the Armenpress news agency.
It was not immediately clear if Pashinyan would meet with Erdoğan or any other Turkish officials during his visit.
Armenia and Turkey officially recognize each other, but the two countries have never established diplomatic relations. Disputes include Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide and Turkey’s assistance to Azerbaijan during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
Pashinyan’s visit comes just months after Turkey briefly opened its long-closed border with Armenia to allow humanitarian aid to enter the country following devastating twin earthquakes. The Armenia-Turkey border has been closed since 1993, when Ankara imposed a devastating economic blockade on Yerevan that remains in place to this day.
Efforts to normalize Armenia-Turkey relations took on a new life in 2021 with the appointment of special envoys for talks, but nothing concrete has come from those negotiations so far.
The last time an Armenian leader went to Turkey was in 2009, when then-President Serzh Sargsyan visited the country during a previous round of normalization talks that ended in failure in part due to fierce opposition from Azerbaijan.
