Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet with leaders of Azerbaijan and Russia this month as efforts to resolve long-standing regional conflicts intensify, a government official said Monday.
Erdogan is to hold talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Baku on May 13 and then meet with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on May 16, the official told AFP.
The talks come amid stepped-up efforts to resolve entangled problems between Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia, in which Russia is involved as a mediator.
Turkey and Armenia - troubled neighbors with a bloody history and no diplomatic ties - announced last month they had agreed a "roadmap" to normalize relations as part of fence-mending talks that have recently gathered momentum.
In Baku, Erdogan is expected to make an effort at allaying the concerns of a close ally that Turkey may reconcile with Armenia and re-open the border between the two countries, overriding Azerbaijani interests.
Turkey sealed its border with Armenia in 1991 in solidarity with Baku over the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh, an Armenian-majority Azerbaijani enclave that Armenia had occupied two years earlier, dealing a heavy economic blow to Armenia.
Turkish-Armenian ties have been poisoned also by the Armenian government's campaign for international recognition of the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as genocide.