Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov arrived in Ankara on Tuesday upon the invitation of his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan.
The pair held a closed-door meeting to discuss bilateral relations and regional issues, diplomatic sources said.
Fidan and Bayramov were also expected to discuss the peace process between Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as normalization talks between Ankara and Yerevan, along with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Türkiye and Azerbaijan have maintained unshaken ties since the latter declared independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The two countries, which share a common ethnic identity, enhanced their relations under the motto of “one nation, two states.”
The Shusha Declaration, signed in 2021 by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, upgraded the relationship to the level of “alliance.” The declaration focuses on defense cooperation and establishing new transportation routes, affirming joint efforts by the two armies in the face of foreign threats and the restructuring and modernization of their armed forces.
Armenia looms large in the relations between both countries. Ties between Baku and Yerevan had remained tense since 1991 when the Armenian military occupied Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan and seven adjacent regions. Most of the territory was liberated by Azerbaijan during a 44-day war in the fall of 2020, which ended after a Russian-brokered peace agreement that opened the door to normalization and talks on border demarcation.
Last September, Azerbaijan established full sovereignty in Karabakh following a “counterterrorism operation” in September last year, after which separatist forces in the region surrendered.
As for Türkiye and Armenia, the two countries had little ties in the past though their intertwined history. Relations were entirely cut off in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union as Armenia engaged in a conflict with Azerbaijan and occupied the territory of Karabakh.
Türkiye and Armenia have also been at odds over their shared history. Armenia accuses Türkiye of “genocide” of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Türkiye rejects the accusations, though it admits to the mass deaths of Armenians during their relocation amid World War I within Ottoman territories.
They shut down borders in 1993 after Armenia illegally took control of Karabakh and, for years, remained hostile to each other. The border was briefly opened in February 2023 to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid following the devastating earthquakes in Türkiye’s southeast. There is already direct air traffic between the countries, but the sides floated the idea of permanently opening the land borders last year.
In 2009, the two countries signed a peace accord as the first step to normalization, but it never fully materialized as the then administration in Yerevan faced domestic opposition to a deal with Türkiye.
Under the current Pashinyan administration, the sides moved to regain momentum with a peace accord, but it was only after Azerbaijan’s victory over the Armenians during the 2020 Karabakh war that cemented the will to move forward for normalization.
In July, Ambassador Serdar Kılıç of Türkiye and the National Assembly of Armenia Deputy Speaker Ruben Rubinyan held the fifth meeting for normalization talks on the border of the two countries, something viewed as a symbol of momentum in the progress.
