relations with the Soviet Union, but at the same time they refused to give up the territories. Turkey itself was in no condition to fight a war with the Soviet Union, which had emerged as a superpower after the second world war. By the autumn of 1945, Soviet troops in the Caucasus were ordered to prepare for a possible invasion of Turkey. Prime Minister Winston Churchill objected to these territorial claims, while President Harry Truman initially felt that the matter should not concern other parties. With the onset of the Cold War, however, the United States came to see Turkey as a useful ally against Soviet expansion and began to support it financially and militarily. By 1948 the Soviet Union dropped its claims to Kars and the other regions. Recent history In April 1993, Turkey closed its Kars border crossing with Armenia, in a protest against the capture of the Kelbajar district of Azerbaijan by Armenian forces during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. Since then the land border between Armenia and Turkey has remained closed. In 2006, former Kars mayor Naif Alibeyoğlu said that opening the border would boost the local economy and reawaken the city. Despite unsuccessful attempts to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries in 2009, there remained opposition and pressure from the local population against the re-opening of the border. Under pressure from Azerbaijan, and the local population, including the 20% ethnic Azerbaijani minority, the Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu reiterated in 2010 and 2011 that opening the border with Armenia was out of the question. , the border remains closed. The last elected mayor of Kars was Ayhan Bilgen of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), who was elected in 2019, and arrested and deposed in 2020. He was replaced by the governor of Kars Province, Eyüp Tepe, as a government-appointed trustee. Demographics According to Turkey's 2011 Statistical Yearbook, the area has been depopulating because of migration to bigger cities. In Istanbul alone, there are 269,388 people from Kars, more than three times the city's population. Today, Kars has a mixed population of Azerbaijanis, Kurds and Turks. The Azerbaijanis are mainly composed of the Terekeme and Qarapapaq sub-ethnic groups. The Shia Azerbaijanis make up 20% of the city's population. Most of the population in Kars is Sunni Muslim, mainly made up by the population of Kurds and Turks, and the minority is Shia Muslim, mainly among the