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The Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) part of the statement issued jointly by the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey and Azerbaijan at the conclusion of their 6th trilateral meeting held in Istanbul on Tuesday is no different from the one adopted at the previous meeting in Baku in late 2017, Vardan Voskanyan, an Armenian expert on Iran, said on Facebook.

He cited a Facebook post by another Armenian expert on Iranian studies Artyom Tonoyan, who shared a photo of the statement showing that the venue of this year’s meeting has not even been changed from Baku to Istanbul in the text.

“The previous five meetings have addressed the [Artsakh] conflict as well. Anyway, I didn’t spot anything new in the joint statement, let alone a possible change in Iran’s position on Armenia,” Tonoyan wrote.

Vardan Voskanyan believes the adopted statement points to the irrelevance of talking about any change in Iran’s position on Armenia, but stresses Armenia should seek new cooperation opportunities with Iran. 

“But this fact doesn’t mean that we should stop searching for new directions of cooperation with Iran even given the sole fact that Azerbaijan makes use of such meetings to exert propaganda pressure on us through various schemes,” he said.

The expert weighed in on the possibility of relaunching the Armenia-Iran-Greece trilateral cooperation as voiced by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in 2016, meantime attaching importance to the trilateral cooperation possibilities to connect Armenia with Georgia and Iran in one case, with Russia and Iran and Turkmenistan and Iran in other cases.

“This would give a new impetus to our foreign policies, meantime strengthening our role throughout the region,” he added.