Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev discussed Türkiye and Azerbaijan’s ties with Armenia in a meeting in Shusha on Friday.
Turkish and Azerbaijani relations with the Caucasus nation of Armenia have long been strained, but recent years have seen signs of possible breakthroughs.
Citing this week’s meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan between Aliyev, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, a Foreign Ministry statement underlined that such trilateral meetings will continue in the future.
“The importance was also highlighted of the 2021 Shusha Declaration, which forms the basis of the close relations between Azerbaijan and Türkiye, particularly in the city of Shusha itself,” the statement added, referring to a city Azerbaijan in recent years liberated from decades of Armenian occupation.
The statement added that the meeting expressed satisfaction with the successful development of fraternal, friendly, and allied relations between the two countries in all areas, stressing the significance of unity and solidarity in the Turkic world.
After the Second Karabakh War, which started between Azerbaijan and Armenia in September 2020 and continued for 44 days, the ice was broken between Ankara and Yerevan. In December 2021, the two nations appointed special envoys to help normalize relations and in February 2022, Türkiye and Armenia resumed their first commercial flights after a two-year hiatus. Serdar Kılıç was appointed as representative for the process on the Turkish side, while Ruben Rubinyan was appointed for Armenia.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have also been able to agree on the basic principles for a peace treaty.
Fidan arrived in Shusha on Friday to participate in a two-day informal summit of heads of state of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS).
Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz will represent the country at the summit, as Erdoğan will be in Germany to attend Türkiye’s football match with the Netherlands in the 2024 EURO Championship.
