Turkey has become a prisoner of relations with Azerbaijan. Alain Simonyan

“On the one hand, Azerbaijan negotiates with us, on the other hand, it does not allow Turkey to negotiate with us. This is a strange situation. Turkey has become a prisoner of these relations,” said Alen Simonyan, according to “Akos” daily.

According to the Speaker of the National Assembly, there are no outstanding problems in the Armenia-Turkey settlement process. “Armenia is ready to open the border, but Turkey is not taking a new step.”

In that case, what is Ankara waiting for, perhaps the results of the Armenian parliamentary elections? Alen Simonyan said that he does not know. “From the beginning, they said that the border will not be opened until the Nagorno-Karabakh problem is solved. Then they announced that the Karabakh problem was solved. After that, the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace agreement was brought into the middle. We negotiated, agreed on 17 points, initialed it, shook hands, but nothing happened after that.”

Alen Simonyan went to Istanbul to participate in the 152nd Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, to meet with his Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani colleagues.

The Speaker of the Turkish Parliament proposed to include Armenia in the Turkey-Georgia-Azerbaijan format.

It has been four years since Yerevan and Ankara started another attempt at reconciliation, but the main agreement of the parties, opening the border for citizens of third countries, is on paper. The Armenian side announced in 2023 that the Margara checkpoint on the Armenian-Turkish border is ready for operation, at the beginning of this year Turkish media wrote that the Alijan checkpoint is also almost ready. But again there was no concrete step towards opening the border.