Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Wednesday a resolution expected to be approved by German lawmakers declaring the 1915 mass killings of Armenians genocide was “ridiculous”.
 
Armenia's president, on the other hand, has urged German lawmakers not to be cowed by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's warnings of damage to Berlin-Ankara relations.
 
German lawmakers are expected to approve the symbolic resolution on Thursday. It follows similar steps pressed in other parliaments, including France, Canada and Germany.
 
Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were massacred in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War One. But it denies that hundreds of thousands were killed, that there was in fact an organized campaign to wipe out the Armenians or that there were any such orders from Ottoman authorities.
 
The opposition Greens have pushed the resolution onto the agenda at a time when Chancellor Angela Merkel, driving force behind an EU-Turkey deal cutting the number of migrants and refugees entering Europe, can ill afford frictions with Erdogan.
 
The EU Turkey deal on migration and refugee flows is already taking serious blows by the visa liberation process which has not been going down smoothly.
 
The resolution, which is formally supported by Merkel's conservative bloc, the center-left Social Democrats and the Greens, uses the word “genocide” in the headline and text.