Overlooking Ararat: Armenia and Turkey launch bilateral trade
The Turkish authorities have announced the lifting of bans on bilateral trade with Armenia. Previously, when moving goods to the Transcaucasian republic, it was necessary to specify a third country, now it will be possible to dispense with customs clearance. Yerevan hopes that a full settlement of relations with Ankara will follow in the near future. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
What happened
The Turkish authorities have announced the lifting of customs restrictions on bilateral trade with Armenia. Previously, Turkish legislation prohibited specifying the Transcaucasian Republic as a destination for exports. As a result, the goods formally went to third countries, then they were reissued and only after that they got to Armenia. Now this rule has been abolished. Thus, the document flow and the process of moving goods will be simplified.
The official representative of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Onju Keceli, noted that all the bureaucratic work on launching bilateral trade has been completed, and preparations for the opening of the border are continuing. According to him, Ankara will continue to work on strengthening cooperation.
This news provoked a strong response in Armenia. During a pre-election meeting with voters in the Shengavit district, the country's Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan approached and whispered something to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. He covered the microphone attached to his clothes with his hand, but the journalists still made out the phrase "the Turks are opening today, let's prepare a text from the press secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."
There was no explanation at the time, but after the Turkish side's announcement, the representative of the Armenian Foreign Ministry, Ani Badalyan, did make a statement in which she announced an important step towards normalizing relations. "This decision is essential for expanding trade and business ties," she said.
In turn, Armenia's special representative for normalization of relations with Turkey, Ruben Rubinyan, explained that direct bilateral trade without unnecessary documents has now become possible. At the same time, supplies of goods will still go through third countries, because the border is still closed. "But we are also working on this issue, including the Gyumri–Kars railway," he announced.
What is important to know
Relations between Armenia and Turkey have remained difficult for at least a century. During the First World War and immediately after it, Turkish nationalists carried out ethnic cleansing, as a result of which up to 2 million Armenians died, more than 600 thousand people were scattered. In addition, under the Moscow and Kara Treaties of 1921, significant territories of Western Armenia, including the symbol of the republic of Mount Ararat, were under Ankara's control.
Yerevan hoped that at some historical moment the territorial issue would be reviewed. Indeed, after the victory in World War II, the leadership of the USSR presented Turkey with claims to the lost areas. Moscow, however, has faced resistance from recent allies from the United States and Britain, and Turkey itself has joined NATO against this background. As a result, the idea of renegotiating the agreements had to be abandoned.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey unequivocally supported Azerbaijan, which entered into a confrontation with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Ankara has refused to establish diplomatic relations with Yerevan, and has also blocked its part of the land border: road and rail transport are still not running, and goods are transiting through Georgia.
Normalization of relations loomed on the horizon after the new Karabakh war in 2020. Then the Armenian forces suffered a heavy defeat and lost control of the disputed region. When the first shock passed, the country's leadership declared that there was a real chance for reconciliation with its neighbors.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that the time has come for the country to abandon the "ideology of historical Armenia," which allegedly causes Yerevan many problems. According to him, the replacement should be the "ideology of real Armenia" within its current borders. Allegedly, only in this case the country will be able to achieve peace with Azerbaijan and Turkey and increase the welfare of its citizens.
In 2024, Yerevan announced that it was no longer going to seek international recognition of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. Nikol Pashinyan said that he did not consider Ararat to be the highest point of the country, instead he named Mount Aragats. Just the other day, he also stated that the movement for the annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh was a mistake and became a brake on the development of the country.
At the same time, the political and diplomatic dialogue intensified. The special Representatives of the two countries, Ruben Rubinyan and Serdar Kilic, have held six meetings since 2022, during which they discussed bilateral detente. And last June, Pashinyan paid his first ever working visit to Istanbul, where he spoke with Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In May of this year, Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz visited Yerevan, where he took part in the summit of the European Political Community.
The parties call the launch of direct passenger and cargo flights the main practical result of all these efforts. On other issues, things are not so easy. For example, back in 2022, Yerevan and Ankara agreed to allow holders of diplomatic passports and citizens of third countries to cross the border, but nothing has changed on earth so far.
The structure of bilateral trade is also characteristic, which has been actively developing since 2021. By the end of 2025, Turkey supplied $368 million worth of goods to the Transcaucasian republic, but only $0.5 million worth of goods were delivered in the opposite direction. In such circumstances, the Armenian opposition warns that opening the land border and establishing relations with Ankara will simply kill the republic's economy.
What the experts say
Turkey has made a fundamental decision to settle relations with Yerevan, says Ruben Safrastyan, a Turkologist and former director of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. Ankara's global interest, in his opinion, is to lock in various logistics routes and communications, for which it is necessary to gain a foothold in the South Caucasus.
— And here it is important to improve relations with Armenia. Therefore, we see that Turkish officials have recently softened their rhetoric, and are also taking small, largely symbolic, steps towards it. They link more serious steps with the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. After the signing of the peace agreement between Yerevan and Baku, we can expect a dramatic improvement in relations with Ankara," the expert emphasizes.
Meanwhile, Viktor Nadein-Rayevsky, senior researcher at IMEMO RAS, director of the Institute for Political and Social Studies of the Black Sea-Caspian Region, warns that Armenia may be severely disappointed due to improved relations with Turkey.
— The theses about peace and open borders sound progressive, but the effect of these decisions may not be at all what is expected in Yerevan. Armenian capital is much weaker than Turkish capital, Turks have cheap labor, and developed production of many categories of goods, from clothing to machinery. It is quite possible that the Armenian market will be completely captured and local producers will be ruined," he explains.
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