Turkish, Armenian and Azeri leaders held landmark talks in Prague today, in fresh signs of smoothing tensions in the southern Caucasus after deadly clashes between Armenia and Turkey-backed Azerbaijan last month.    

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Premier Nikol Pashinyan gathered on the sidelines of the European Political Community summit. The leaders “talked for a while in the foyer area,” an official Turkish statement said. An image released by Turkey’s official communication director showed Aliyev and Erdogan facing each other with Pashinyan sitting in the middle at a table along with other officials, including Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

Erdogan and Pashinyan also held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the meeting, the directorate added. The meeting marked the first of its kind after years when the normalization process between Ankara and Yerevan broke up 13 years ago. 

The talks came after rekindled clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan last month over the conflicted Nagorno-Karabakh region. The clashes continued for days amid mutual recriminations from Baku and Yerevan, leaving at least 150 deaths on both sides.