The Armenian government expects Turkish airlines to enter Gyumri airport. In parallel, official contacts between Yerevan, Ankara and Baku are turning into a normal working process aimed at the regulation of regional relations.
RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced this in a briefing following the government session on April 18, noting that the process of expanding air traffic is already underway, and there is hope that new flights will be made to Gyumri in the near future.
The head of the executive reminded that the agreement on the implementation of Turkish Airlines flights to Yerevan was reached earlier, during the meeting with the President of Turkey in China. The Turkish side took the initiative, to which the official Yerevan responded positively.
Referring to the tripartite diplomatic contacts, Pashinyan emphasized that communication between Armenian, Turkish and Azerbaijani officials should be perceived as a daily work activity. Although, according to the Prime Minister, there are no conceptual news in the negotiations at the moment, daily consistent work is being done to find edges for the development of relations.
Speaking about the prospects of opening the Armenian-Turkish border and concluding a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, he assured that the main problem is not the actual implementation, but the specification of the dates, and the government is making maximum efforts to achieve the results as soon as possible.
The process of normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations without preconditions was officially started at the end of 2021 with the appointment of special envoys Ruben Rubinyan and Serdar Kilic. As a result of bilateral negotiations, the parties managed to implement a number of important agreements. In particular, at the beginning of 2022, passenger air traffic between Yerevan and Istanbul was restarted, and in January 2023, Ankara officially lifted the ban on direct air cargo transportation.
However, some key agreements still remain incomplete or are in the process of implementation. The most important of them is the agreement reached in the summer of 2022 on the opening of the land border for citizens of third countries and holders of diplomatic passports. Although the Armenian side has completely completed the modernization and technical equipment of the “Margara” checkpoint, the border remains closed because, according to the statements of the Armenian envoy, the Turkish side has just started infrastructure works in its territory. In addition, the project of the joint restoration of the historical border bridge of Ani is currently in the stage of technical and documentary agreement.
At the same time, Turkey, despite its commitment to negotiate without preconditions, has not refused to condition the Armenian-Turkish process with Armenian-Azerbaijani peace negotiations.
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