“It has been more than three months since the Turkish and Armenian foreign ministers signed the two protocols that were supposed to launch a historic reconciliation and rapprochement process between Yerevan and Ankara,” Turkish Today’s Zaman reads. NEWS.am posts the passages.

According to the daily, “there were major obstacles from the very start. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already linked the ratification of the protocols and the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border to Armenian concessions in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

“Given the considerable influence of the Azeri lobby in Turkey and the fact that Turkey gets much of its oil and gas from Azerbaijan, this outside pressure further exacerbates domestic difficulties. All these dynamics explain the AKP’s reluctance vis-à-vis the ratification of the two protocols,” the daily says.

Speaking about Armenia’s stance the author underlined that “situation in Armenia is equally complicated.”

“Yerevan has no intention of relinquishing control of Nagorno-Karabakh and must contend with the hard-line views of its influential global Diaspora and vocal domestic opposition. The majority of Diaspora Armenians have spent decades trying to persuade their governments to recognize the mass killing of Turkish Armenians in 1915-1918 as Genocide. Given all these dimensions to the problem, there are clear limits to how much pressure the administration of Serzh Sarksyan can endure. Facing growing domestic opposition, the pressure of the diaspora and the negative tone in Ankara, it is not surprising that Yerevan is having second thoughts about staying the course. Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan recently cautioned that if Turkey tried to link the Karabakh progress to the ratification of the protocols then Armenia &‘would be free’ to impose conditions of its own.”