Retired Turkish envoys press Ankara for concrete normalization steps before Armenia's 7 June vote

Three retired Turkish ambassadors spent three days in Yerevan in late April, a month before Armenia's 7 June general election, in what one of them described as a private visit and an opportunity to take the country's pulse. Among the travellers were Hasan Servet Öktem, who survived a 1984 ASALA assassination attempt while serving at Türkiye's embassy in Tehran, and Ömer Önhon. Their itinerary included separate dinners with Armenia's 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.

The visitors found Yerevan more developed than expected. Mnatsakanyan told them Armenia received 250,000 tourists during his term as foreign minister and 3 million last year, with heavy traffic from Russians, Iranians and Ukrainians; he said Russian-Ukrainian joint ventures had been routing exports into Europe through Armenia to bypass sanctions. Roughly three or four in ten Armenians the visitors encountered in cafés and on the street spoke Turkish.

On Türkiye–Armenia relations, the diplomats' assessment is that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has paid a domestic political price to chart a normalization course: 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. But Armenians, they report, are aggrieved that the move has not been reciprocated; the Alican border crossing was promised yet 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, in their reading, is Armenia's 1991 constitution. The body of the text does not use the word genocide, but its preamble points to 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.

With a month to go, Yerevan does not yet feel like a country in campaign mode, the diplomats noted: candidate posters are scarce. 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 in cafés and taxis often declined to state a preference. The first national vote since the 2023 loss in the second Karabakh war will, in their view, decide not just Pashinyan's future but Armenia's broader political direction.

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. One Armenian official told the visitors that “Americans spending $10 produce the impact Russians get with $1.” The Armenian Apostolic Church, traditionally a political weight, is also unenthusiastic about the prime minister.

Layered on top of all of this is a population of roughly 118,000 ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh in six days after Azerbaijan's 2020 victory in the second Karabakh war. They have not yet been granted Armenian citizenship and cannot vote on 7 June; the state has allocated land plots but no housing assistance, leaving the displaced angry at Pashinyan. The Yerevan visit lands amid an active normalization track elsewhere: 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.