The leaders of former foes Turkey and Armenia held their first face-to-face meeting since the two countries agreed on relations.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met Thursday in Prague on the sidelines of a summit of country leaders to launch a “European Political Community” aimed at strengthening security and economic prosperity across Europe.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev also spoke at what appeared to be an informal meeting of the three leaders. No main points emerged from what they discussed immediately.
Turkey and Armenia, which have no diplomatic relations, agreed last year to start talks to end decades of bitterness and reopen their shared border.
Special envoys appointed through the two countries have held 4 rounds of talks since then.
Their talks resulted in an agreement to resume charter flights between Turkey’s Istanbul city and the Armenian capital of Yerevan.
Turkey, a close friend of Azerbaijan, closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in solidarity with Baku, which locked up a dispute with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
In 2020, Turkey heavily subsidized Azerbaijan in the six-week dispute with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, which ended with a Russian-brokered peace deal that allowed Azerbaijan to take over a significant component of the region.
Turkey and Armenia also have more than a century of hostility over the deaths of around 1. 5 million Armenians in the massacres, deportations and forced marches that began in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey.
This is the moment of the attempt at reconciliation between Ankara and Yerevan. Turkey and Armenia reached an agreement in 2009 to identify formal relations and open their border, but the agreement was never ratified due to strong opposition from Azerbaijan.
Last month, Armenia and Azerbaijan brokered a ceasefire to end an outbreak of fighting that left 155 people dead on both sides.