By Mark Dovich
A meeting next month between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “cannot be ruled out,” a spokesperson for Armenia’s Foreign Ministry told the Armenpress news agency Thursday, after Erdoğan raised the possibility in remarks to the press earlier that day.
“As of now, such a meeting has not been confirmed. If the meeting is confirmed, we will inform the public in due time,” spokesperson Vahan Hunanyan said.
Earlier Thursday, Erdoğan told reporters at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City he “may have a meeting” with Pashinyan at a European Union summit next month.
“We are now evaluating whether or not to attend the summit in Prague,” Erdoğan was quoted as saying by the Hürriyet news site, referring to the European Political Community summit slated for early October in the Czech Republic. “If we have to attend…we may have a meeting with him.”
It would be the first-ever meeting between Pashinyan and Erdoğan and only the second time the two leaders have directly talked.
Pashinyan and Erdoğan spoke by phone in July, marking the first conversation between Armenian and Turkish leaders in many years.
In their call, Pashinyan and Erdoğan “expressed their expectations that the agreements reached” to partially reopen the Armenia-Turkey border “will be implemented soon,” according to an Armenian government read-out.
At a meeting earlier that month, special envoys from Yerevan and Ankara agreed to open their countries’ land border to citizens of third countries “at the earliest possible date,” Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said.
But after more than two months, the border remains closed, and neither side has announced a concrete timeline for reopening it.
The Armenia-Turkey border, which stretches for hundreds of kilometers, has been closed since the early 1990s, when Turkey, together with Azerbaijan, imposed a devastating economic blockade on Armenia that remains in place to this day.
Efforts to normalize the extremely fraught relations between Yerevan and Ankara took on a new life late last year, when both sides appointed special envoys for talks. Special envoys Ruben Rubinyan and Serdar Kılıç have held four rounds of negotiations so far this year, but have made little apparent progress.