Türkiye's Private Envoy Visit to Armenia Ahead of Election

A private visit to Yerevan dominated Türkiye's geopolitical news this Saturday. Three retired ambassadors — Hasan Servet Öktem, who survived a 1984 ASALA assassination attempt while serving at Türkiye's embassy in Tehran, and Ömer Önhon among them — spent three days in the Armenian capital in late April, a month before the country's 7 June general election. Their itinerary included separate dinners with former foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan (2018–2020), Karel Mirzoyan, the last so-called foreign minister of Armenian-controlled Karabakh, the Turkish-Armenian businessman Samson Özararat, and Gerard Libaridian, the American-Armenian historian and longtime adviser to Armenia's first president Ter Petrosyan. Mnatsakanyan told the visitors that Armenia received 250,000 tourists during his term and 3 million last year, with heavy traffic from Russians, Iranians and Ukrainians; Russian-Ukrainian joint ventures, he said, had been routing exports into Europe through Armenia to bypass sanctions.

The visitors' assessment is that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has paid a domestic political price to chart a normalization course with Türkiye: he has stopped raising genocide-recognition claims internationally and turned to unconditional dialogue with Ankara. They describe this as a bold step for a leader whose country has had a century of anti-Turkish narrative pumped into public life and which lost a war three years ago. Armenians, they report, are aggrieved that the move has not been reciprocated; the Alican border crossing was promised but did not open at the start of the year. An open Turkish endorsement of Pashinyan would backfire before 7 June, the visitors argue, but Yerevan is watching for several concrete normalization steps.

The largest standing obstacle is Armenia's 1991 constitution. The body of the text does not use the word genocide, but its preamble references the country's independence declaration, which characterises the 1915 events as such; Article 11 designates parts of eastern and southeastern Türkiye as “Western Armenia.” Pashinyan has publicly said the problematic articles must be changed — described by the visitors as another bold move — but a constitutional revision is not feasible before the election.

The contest is essentially between Pashinyan's Civil Contract Party and the Strong Armenia Party of Samvel Karapetyan, who is under house arrest awaiting trial on charges of plotting against the government. Polling puts Pashinyan around 30 percent, but voters the visitors met often declined to state a preference. The American embassy in Yerevan, with about 1,800 staff, is one of the largest US missions in the world, but the visitors say Washington's leverage is outweighed by Moscow's: Pashinyan travelled to Moscow last week, where President Vladimir Putin told reporters that good relations with Yerevan would be impossible while “Russia's friends” remained imprisoned — a remark widely read as referring to Karapetyan. The Armenian Apostolic Church, traditionally a political weight, is also unenthusiastic about Pashinyan, and roughly 118,000 ethnic Armenians displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan's 2020 victory have not yet been granted Armenian citizenship and so cannot vote on 7 June.

The Yerevan visit lands amid an active normalization track elsewhere in the South Caucasus: Armenia and Azerbaijan held their thirteenth border-delimitation meeting on 1 May and agreed on draft instructions, and on 29 April Yerevan signalled wider plans for peace with Baku, EU ambitions and major infrastructure projects.