Turkey’s NTV broadcaster was the first to report on Sunday that Turkish envoy Serdar Kilic will travel to Armenia by land, through a closed Turkish-Armenian border crossing, to meet with deputy parliament speaker Ruben Rubinian.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry and Rubinian confirmed the report. But they did not specify the dates of Kilic’s visit.
“We will discuss [joint] steps that have been taken to date or steps that are in progress,” Rubinian told reporters on Monday.
According to NTV, Rubinian and Kilic will discuss the implementations of agreements reached by them during several rounds of negotiations held since 2022. Those include an agreement to open the Turkish-Armenian border for Armenian and Turkish diplomatic passport holders as well as citizens of third countries.
Ankara has been reluctant to implement it so far. It has for decades made the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border and establishment of diplomatic relations with Yerevan conditional on a resolution of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict acceptable to Azerbaijan.
Rubinian expressed confidence that Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements brokered by the United States last month and welcomed by Turkey will speed up the Turkish-Armenian normalization process. “In this regard, yes, we are optimistic,” he said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian met in Istanbul in June. Erdogan said afterwards that Armenia has adopted a “more flexible approach” to Azerbaijan’s Turkish-backed demands for a transit corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave.
Yerevan insisted until then that the transit of people and cargo through Armenia’s strategic Syunik province cannot be exempt from Armenian border controls. Pashinian signaled a softening of this stance after meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Abu Dhabi in July.
During the August 8 talks in Washington with Aliyev hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump he accepted a U.S. proposal to have an American company manage traffic through the corridor. Pashinian’s domestic critics accused him of agreeing to open the kind of an extraterritorial corridor that that has been sought by Baku and Ankara.