Erdogan’s office did not issue a statement on the conversation or comment on it otherwise. The official Armenian readout of the call gave no details of “recent developments of the regional and international agenda” discussed by the two leaders.
It said that both Erdogan and Pashinian “emphasized their political will to fully normalize relations between Armenia and Turkey without any preconditions.” In that regard, they stressed the importance of continued contacts between their special envoys and “reaffirmed” their commitment to agreements reached by the latter in 2022, added the statement.
One of those agreements calls for the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border for Armenian or Turkish diplomatic passport and citizens of third countries. Ruben Rubinian, the Armenian official who negotiated it with senior Turkish diplomat Serdar Kilic, said as recently as on June 11 that unlike Yerevan, Ankara has taken no steps to implement it.
Erdogan and other Turkish leaders have repeatedly made clear that further progress in the normalization process is contingent on the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace accord sought by Azerbaijan. They have also demanded that Armenia open an extraterritorial corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave.
Although Yerevan continues to reject these demands, Pashinian’s political opponents say he is willing to not only accept them but also give ground on the issue of the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire denied by Ankara. They pounced on Pashinian’s controversial statement issued on April 24 during official commemorations of the 109th anniversary of the genocide.
In that statement, Pashinian no longer called for wider international recognition of the genocide and said instead that Armenians should “overcome the trauma” caused by the World War One-era extermination of some 1.5 million of their ethnic kin.
Earlier in April, a senior Armenian pro-government lawmaker, Andranik Kocharian, called for “verifying” the number of the genocide victims and ascertaining the circumstances of their deaths. He said Pashinian wants to “make the entire list of compatriots subjected to genocide more objective.” Faced with an uproar from Armenian opposition leaders, civil society figures and genocide scholars, Kocharian claimed the following day that he only expressed his personal opinion.