Turkish foreign minister announces plan for closer ties with Armenia

Turkey and Armenia are to mutually appoint special envoys to discuss normalizing historically hostile ties between the two neighbors.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusuglu, announced the news in the parliament on Monday. He said Turkey would also resume charter flights between Istanbul and Yerevan.

The thaw comes barely over a year after Turkey intervened militarily to clinch Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia when the long-dormant conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh erupted anew in October.

Azerbaijan wrested back all the occupied territories in a short, sharp war that was deeply traumatizing for Armenia, which lives in the shadow of the 1915 genocide of more than a million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In more recent years, the borders have remained sealed since 1993, when Armenia occupied large swathes of Turkey’s close ally Azerbaijan in a bloody conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave