Grigor Balasanyan | What to Expect in 2026? | Turkey will not open border, Armenia does not have market worth ‘fighting for’

International relations expert Grigor Balasanyan, speaking with Alpha News as part of the project “What to Expect in 2026?”, emphasized that Turkey has neither the desire nor the intention to normalize relations with Armenia, and that it will seek to extract maximum benefit from Armenia—not only for itself, but also for Baku.

“The Turkish-Azerbaijani duo has launched a rather remarkable game. Azerbaijan says: we will sign a peace treaty when you normalize relations with Turkey, and Turkey says: we will open the border with you if you normalize relations with Azerbaijan. This is a vicious circle into which Armenia has been thrown, and the saddest part is that we ourselves walked into it. Who asked us to announce the start of the Armenian-Turkish reconciliation process? Turkey will not open its border either to Armenian citizens or to third countries, because it is not interested. It is not interested even economically, since the Armenian market is not one the Turks would ‘fight for,’” Balasanyan said.

According to him, Erdogan has turned the issue of opening the border into a political whim and will do everything possible to extract maximum benefit from Pashinyan.

“Erdogan has struck gold with Armenia, which fulfills all his wishes without receiving anything in return. So why should he open the border and worsen relations with Aliyev? After all, Aliyev might not understand this. Our task should have been to take advantage of the divergences between Turkey and Azerbaijan, not to link the opening of the Armenian-Turkish border with the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty, because Erdogan needed to open the border to show the EU that he is the head of a democratic state. We should have used this to make Erdogan dependent on us. But I believe the ship has sailed, and to speak now of possible normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations is, at the very least, political short-sightedness,” Balasanyan said.