[1] Whilst Turkey recognised Armenia (in the borders of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic) shortly after the latter proclaimed independence in September 1991, it has refused to establish diplomatic relations.

[7][8] In December 2021, Armenia and Turkey announced appointing special envoys who met in Moscow in January 2022,[9] with positive international reactions for attempts of normalising relations.

These Turkic tribes came around the south end of the Caspian Sea for the most part, and hence absorbed and transmitted Islamic culture and civilization in contrast to other Turks who, such as the Cumans, became partially Westernized and Christianized.

[15] The concurrent and accumulated testimony of hundreds and thousands of intelligent people, Christian and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, European and American, made it conclusively certain that a massacre of innocents, unparalleled for ages, had been perpetrated in the Armenian provinces of Turkey.

While it was unclear to what extent the violence against Armenians was governmentally organized, Cleveland's speech noted that "strong evidence exists of actual complicity of Turkish soldiers in the work of destruction and robbery.

The Hinchak and Dashnak, Armenian revolutionary committees, were formed following the 1878 Berlin Treaty in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which were very much under direct Russian threat.

They consist of patriotic young Armenians who have had to expatriate themselves because the cruel practices of the Turk, and who are trying in this way to bring about the relief which Turkish rulers have promised ever since the Berlin Congress.In 1894, Zeki Pasha, Commandant of the Fourth Army Corps, was decorated for his participation during the Sassoun massacre.

[47] Amidst a spate of attacks in 1985, U.S. President Ronald Reagan asked Congress to defeat a resolution recognizing the "genocidal massacre" of Armenians, in part for his fear that it might indirectly "reward terrorism".

[citation needed] Turkey cosponsored UN Security Council Resolution 822 affirming Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity and demanding that Armenian forces withdraw from Kelbajar.

[55] Armenia, which has no coal, natural gas or oil of its own and scant wind and water resources, had long been suffering from severe energy shortages and now blockaded by neighbouring Turkey and Azerbaijan, from whom it used to import nearly all its fuel, was forced to announce that it would restart the second of two VVER reactors in the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant.

"[56] Metsamor unit-2 was recommissioned in 1995 after an estimated $50m had been spent on safety improvements but this did little to alleviate safety concerns in Turkey and the Turkish Atomic Energy Agency (TAEK) along with the Turkish Environment and Forestry Ministry, Kafkas University and various institutes and foundations formed a tight infrastructure of control in the region across the border from the reactor and set up the RESAI early warning system to take constant measurements of airborne gamma radiation levels and sample analyses of local soil, plant, and food to give advance warning when levels rise above threshold limits.

"[59] On June 9, 2000, in a full-page statement in The New York Times, 126 scholars, including Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel, historian Yehuda Bauer, and sociologist Irving Horowitz, signed a document "affirming that the World War I Armenian genocide is an incontestable historical fact and accordingly urge the governments of Western democracies to likewise recognize it as such.

[citation needed] The Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission was launched on 9 July 2001 in Geneva, Switzerland with ten individuals from Armenia, Turkey, Russia, and the United States mostly consisting of former high-ranking politicians renowned for their past achievements who aimed "to promote mutual understanding and goodwill between Turks and Armenians and to encourage improved relations."

"[67] The Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey, following the 2002 Turkish general election, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül with a foreign policy formulated by Ahmet Davutoğlu that postulated "zero problems with neighbours" leading to new hope for Armenian–Turkish relations.

This report ruled that the term "genocide" aptly describes "the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915–1918", but added that the modern Republic of Turkey was not legally liable for the event.

[79] Former Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan, while conceding that "genocide denial hurts", insists that the Turkish viewpoint does not necessarily "impede the normalization of our relations".

[80] As of 2005 Turkey opened its airspace to Armenia in a limited capacity with the resumption of Armavia flights between Yerevan and Istanbul; land trade however continued to be diverted through Georgia.

[citation needed] In 2005 a group of Turkish scholars and opinion makers held an academic conference at which, it was vowed, all points of view about the Armenian massacre would be respectfully heard.

More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches" and condemned Turkish attempts to deny its factual and moral reality.

"[87] In April 2015, Armenia's president Serzh Sargsyan said "It becomes obvious that the Turkish proposal of establishing the so-called commission of historians has only one goal, which is to delay the process of the Armenian genocide recognition, and divert the attention of international community from that crime.

[106] On the eve of the 2009 US presidential visit to Turkey by Barack Obama sources in Ankara and Yerevan announced that a deal might soon be struck to reopen the border between the two states and exchange diplomatic personnel.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a report on the normalisation stating, "The politicized debate whether to recognize as genocide the destruction of much of the Ottoman Armenian population and the stalemated Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh should not halt momentum."

"[129] In response, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement on July 12, 2013: Such a declaration made by an official occupying a position as important as that of Prosecutor General reflects the prevailing problematic mentality in Armenia as to the territorial integrity of its neighbor Turkey and to Turkish-Armenian relations and also contradicts the obligations it has undertaken towards the international organizations of which it is a member, particularly the UN and the OSCE.

[135] The Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a statement which condemned the 2019 Turkish offensive into north-eastern Syria, "which would lead to deterioration of regional security, losses among civilians, mass displacement and eventually to a new humanitarian crisis.

[100] with positive reactions from European Commission spokesman Peter Stano, NATO Secretary General's Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, Javier Colomina, Turkish pro-government newspapers, and senior fellow of Carnegie Europe Thomas de Waal.

[142] On 12 March 2022, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu met with his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan for "useful and constructive" talks in an effort to restore ties after decades of hostility.

[145] On 6 October 2022, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met face-to-face for the first time in Prague during the European Political Community meeting.

[148] On 15 February 2023 Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan met with his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu in Ankara, and reiterated Armenia's readiness to aid in the disaster relief efforts.

[156][157][158][159] The Republic of Turkey rejects the 1.5 million figure for the final death toll, insisting that the deaths were closer to the range of 200,000–300,000,[160] and insists that they were the result of disease, famine and inter-ethnic strife during the turmoil of World War I, saying that the Armenian Dashnak and Henchak rebels had sided with the Russian Army which invaded eastern Anatolia during the war and committed massacres against the local Muslim population (Turks and Kurds) in that area.

"[171] It was in response to this issue following the announcement that the Dashnak Party decided to withdraw from the coalition government feeling that renunciation of Armenian territorial claims would be an unacceptably radical change in the country's foreign policy.