GNV News June 25, 2025

June 20, 2025, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited Istanbul, Turkey, and met with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Turkey and Armenia have no formal diplomatic relations, and this visit was the first working visit to Turkey by an Armenian prime minister.   

At the meeting, they reportedly discussed the progress of peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have been in conflict for many years; efforts to normalize relations between Armenia and Turkey; and the conflict between Iran and Israel, which border both countries.

Relations between the two countries are considered historically tense over the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. While some historians argue that this amounts to genocide, Turkey acknowledges that many people died at the time but says the death toll has been inflated and that the deaths were due to the chaos of war, and it denies the genocide.

In 1993, when Armenian forces occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas of Azerbaijan, Turkey, in support of its ally Azerbaijan, closed its border with Armenia. Since then, cross-border travel and diplomatic dialogue between the two countries had long been suspended. However, since the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, Armenia has been actively seeking to repair relations with Turkey. In fact, Pashinyan attended Erdoğan’s presidential inauguration in June 2023, and the two leaders have continued contact through summits and other forums.

Learn more about Turkey’s diplomacy → “Turkey: An Expanding Sphere of Influence”

Learn more about relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan → “Repeated Military Clashes: Nagorno-Karabakh”

The Turkey–Armenia border (Photo: Գարվիք / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0])