The Turkish Government has lifted restrictions on direct trade with Armenia, drawing an immediate welcome from Yerevan and marking another cautious step in a rapprochement between two neighbours that have spent more than three decades estranged, with their shared border sealed shut.
Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Öncü Keçeli framed the move as part of the “confidence-building measures adopted within the framework of the normalisation process with Armenia, ongoing since 2022”.
“The bureaucratic preparations regarding the initiation of direct trade between our country and Armenia have been completed as of May 11,” he said in a statement published by the ministry.
Under the new arrangement, exporters can now formally list Turkey or Armenia as the origin or final destination of goods, even though shipments will still have to transit through a third country in the absence of a functioning common border. In practice, most trade currently passes through Georgia.
“The necessary technical and bureaucratic work toward opening the common border between the two countries is still ongoing,” Keçeli said, adding that Ankara saw “a historic opportunity to strengthen lasting peace and prosperity in the south Caucasus” and would keep “contributing to the development of economic relations” in the region.
The Armenian foreign ministry welcomed the announcement, describing it as “another result of the normalisation process of relations between Armenia and Turkey”.
“This decision is significant from the perspective of expanding trade and ties between the business circles of both countries, promoting economic connectivity and ensuring peace and prosperity in the region,” it said.
Yerevan added that it considered the step “an important move towards the development of full and normal relations between the two countries”, which it hoped would find “its logical continuation through the opening of the border between Armenia and Turkey and the establishment of diplomatic relations”.
Turkey severed ties with Armenia in 1993 over the Armenian occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic-Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan that had declared independence with separatist institutions rejected by Baku. Azerbaijan retook the region in 2023 after a series of military offensives, prompting most of its Armenian population to flee.
Ankara and Yerevan appointed special envoys in 2021 and opened a dialogue aimed at restoring diplomatic ties, though the process has been complicated by Turkey’s close alliance with Azerbaijan and by its refusal to recognise as genocide the early-20th-century massacres of Armenians in the then Ottoman empire.
Turkey does not deny that mass killings of Armenian civilians took place. It does, though, reject the genocide label, despite recognition by numerous historians and governments, and argues that the deaths were not the result of a deliberate extermination plan by the Ottoman authorities during the First World War.
Recent months have seen further small openings. In April, both sides agreed to put the dormant Kars-Gyumri railway line back into service, while in March Turkish Airlines operated its first direct commercial flight between Istanbul and Yerevan.
