Recognition of so-called "Armenian genocide" to deteriorate US-Turkey relations - Russian expert

By Trend

The recognition by US President Joe Biden of the so-called "Armenian genocide" will lead to a deterioration in relations between the US and Turkey, Director of the Institute for Political Studies, Russian political scientist Sergei Markov told Trend.

Speaking about the reasons why Biden did this, Sergei Markov stressed that the US President wants to create a tool of constant pressure on Turkey: "He wants to talk with Turkey from a position of strength."

According to the Russian political scientist, there are contradictions in Biden's actions: “On the one hand, Biden said that he wants to improve relations with Turkey, on the other hand, he is deteriorating them so drastically. How to understand this, no one can say now, because there are the same problems in relation to Russia. I think that Ankara is looking at Biden’s administration with some amazement and cannot understand what they really want.”

Touching upon the issue of the absence of obvious evidence of the so-called "Armenian genocide", Markov noted that the concept of genocide was introduced after the Second Karabakh War.

"In this sense, the majority believes that there would be a lot of interethnic massacres, and therefore it is legally impossible to define this retroactively - the law has no retroactive effect. These events cannot be defined, since at that moment this term did not yet exist," he added.

US President Joseph Biden called the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire “genocide".

Armenia and the Armenian lobby claim that Turkey's predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, allegedly carried out so-called "genocide" against the Armenians living in Anatolia in 1915.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated previously that there was no genocide against Armenians in the history of Turkey and the events of 1915 need investigation.

Turkey called on Armenia to open the archives of 1915 and create a joint commission to investigate the events. But Armenia has not yet responded to Turkey's proposal.