Turkish Airlines to Begin Flights to Armenia in March

Turkish Airlines announced plans to launch regular passenger flights between Istanbul and Yerevan beginning March, 2026.

The announcement was made by Serdar Kilic, Turkey’s special envoy of the normalization process with Armenia, in a social media post.

He said that Turkey’s national carrier is expected to operate daily flights starting March 11 of next year, according to Sputnik Armenia.

Ruling party lawmakers had confirmed that discussions were underway to establish a route for those flights, without revealing a date.

The announcement comes despite the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries and Turkey’s continued closure of the land border with Armenia since 1993. While Ankara and Yerevan declared their readiness to pursue normalization in December 2021 and appointed special envoys shortly thereafter, progress on substantive commitments has remained limited. Notably, agreements reached in Vienna in July 2022 to open the border to third-country nationals and initiate direct cargo transportation have yet to be implemented, more than three years later.

Armenia and Turkey agreed to engage in normalization talks without preconditions. Official Ankara, however—including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey—have emphasized that no agreement would be reached with Yerevan without the signing of a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Kılıc visited Armenia earlier this fall and met with his Armenian counterpart Ruben Rubinyan. An announcement regarding that meeting was framed as an effort to accelerate the process.

Ankara has been seen as lacking the political will to normalize ties with Armenia, and is using the process to pressure Yerevan into signing a peace agreement with Azerbaijan, which has threatened its own preconditions for the eventual signing of an agreement.