No agreement yet on another meeting of Armenian and Turkish envoys for normalization of relations- Armenian foreign ministry

YEREVAN, August 11. /ARKA/. Vahan Hunanyan, a spokesman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry, said there was no agreement at the moment on another meeting of Armenian and Turkish envoys for normalization of relations, as reported by some Turkish mass media outlets.

'We inform the public in advance about such meetings,' Vahan Hunanyan told Armenpress agency.        

Quoting a high-ranking Turkish diplomat Turkish mass media wrote that the next meeting of special envoys can be held in Turkey in September.

The latest, fourth meeting of the special envoys - Ruben Rubinyan of Armenia and Serdar Kilic of Turkey was held on July 1 in Vienna, Austria.

The first round of talks was held in Moscow on Jan. 14, where both parties agreed to continue negotiations without any preconditions. The Turkish and Armenian envoys met for the second and third time in Vienna on Feb. 24 and May 3, 2022.

As part of the normalization dialogue, on March 12, 2022 a meeting took place between the foreign ministers of Turkey and Armenia on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum.

Although Turkey was one of the first countries to recognize Armenia’s independence from the former Soviet Union, the countries have no diplomatic ties and Turkey shut down their common border in 1993, in a show of solidarity with Azerbaijan which was locked in a conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Turkey also refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide, committed during 1915-1923 when an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by the Ottoman government. The overwhelming majority of historians widely view the event as genocide.

In 2009, Ankara and Yerevan reached an agreement in Zurich to establish diplomatic relations and to open their joint border, but Turkey later said it could not ratify the deal until Armenia withdrew from Nagorno-Karabakh.

In 2020, Turkey strongly backed Azerbaijan in the six-week conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh which ended with a Russia-brokered peace deal that saw Azerbaijan gain control of a significant part of Nagorno-Karabakh. -0-