Turkey and Armenia want to speak to each other again after years of diplomatic ice age.

Both sides are now taking the first steps towards normalizing their difficult bilateral relations, which they had been waiting for weeks ago.

On Monday evening, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoglu announced the appointment of a special envoy for Armenia and the resumption of charter flights between Istanbul and the Armenian capital Yerevan.

Rainer Hermann

Editor in politics.

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The Armenian Foreign Ministry also announced on Tuesday that it would appoint a “special envoy for dialogue” with Turkey. Armenia is "ready to normalize relations with Turkey without preconditions," said the spokesman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry, Vakhan Hounanian. This was preceded by indirect meetings between the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and the Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Sochi, Russia, at the end of November. Both spoke separately with President Vladimir Putin.

The Turkish leadership indicated its willingness to hold talks with Armenia since October.

On October 26, during a visit to Fuzuli, which Azerbaijan had conquered from Armenia a year earlier, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that there would be no obstacle to normalizing relations between Turkey and Armenia if Armenia showed its honest will Resolve problems with Azerbaijan.

Corridor under Russian responsibility

On November 9, the first anniversary of the armistice that ended the six-week war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar urged Armenia not to let the gestures of peace of the Ankara and Baku tours go by. During the war, Azerbaijani troops, supported by Turkish and Israeli drones, conquered large parts of the Nagornyj-Karabakh region, which was predominantly inhabited by Armenians, but is considered part of Azerbaijan under international law.

Turkey concretized its wishes at the eighth summit of the Cooperation Council of Turkish-speaking States in Istanbul on November 12;

Ankara is increasingly using this conversation format, which was founded in 2009, to reassert its influence in Central Asia as it did in the 1990s.

Erdogan uses the platform to present himself as the leader of the Turkic speaking world.

The focus of the Cooperation Council's projects is on creating a transport corridor between the member states, i.e. from Turkey to Kazakhstan on the Chinese border.

However, this requires a corridor through Armenia.

Because Turkey only has a ten-kilometer land border with the Azerbaijani enclave Nakhichevan, which is not connected to Azerbaijan.

The creation of such a corridor, named after the Sangesur mountain ridge, is already foreseen in the ceasefire agreement of November 2020.

Accordingly, Russia would be responsible for the security of the corridor.

In January Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan set up a working group to come up with proposals for improving transport connections.

The gateway to the South Caucasus

The plans for this corridor may also have prompted the major Iranian military maneuvers at the beginning of October on the border with Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Because Iran fears for its close relations with Armenia, also in trade, while relations with Azerbaijan are bad, not least because of the - also military - Israeli presence there.

Georgia, which has so far benefited from the closure of the border between Turkey and Armenia, would also be the loser.

Should it come to normalization between Turkey and Armenia, old railway connections could be used again, like those between Nakhchivan and Baku and between Yerevan and Iran.

For Turkey, southern Armenia would be the gateway to the southern Caucasus and the Turkic states.

The Turkish-Armenian talks will focus on the status of this corridor.

Armenia insists on a solution in which it does not cede sovereignty to another state.

The two states also have to settle the tensions that existed as a result of the Armenian genocide in 1915.

Ankara refuses to recognize the genocide.