Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan arrived in Ankara on Saturday to participate in the inauguration ceremony of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Pashinyan was welcomed at the airport by Ambassador Serdar Kilic, Turkey’s special envoy for normalization with Armenia. The prime minister is accompanied on this trip by Ruben Rubinyan, Armenia’s special envoy for normalization.
Pashinyan attended Erdogan’s inauguration ceremony, which took place in the presidential palace where leaders from around 20 countries attended the ceremony. Pashinyan was greeted at the event by Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.
Also attending the event was President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan. According to government sources a meeting between Pashinyan and Aliyev did not take place.
The two met on Thursday in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, in talks hosted by European Council President Charles Michel and attended by President Emmanuel Macron of France and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
This is the first time Armenia’s top leader has attended an inauguration of a Turkish president. In 2014, Armenia’s then foreign minister, Edward Nalbandian, represented Armenia at Erdogan’s first inauguration as president.
Erdogan and Pashinyan met in October in Prague on the margins of a European summit.
