On February 3, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey visited Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital city, at the invitation of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to attend the 10th session of the High-Level Ukraine-Turkey Strategic Council. The Turkish President stressed, “We support the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine including Crimea.”
The security issue was the major topic of the summit meeting of the two presidents. After the talks, President Erdoğan offered Turkey to host a Ukrainian-Russian peace summit or low-level meetings because Turkey is interested in assisting the de-escalation of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
The Turkish President underscored, “Turkey is ready to do everything it can to end the crisis involving the two neighbouring with us countries. I said at the today’s talks that we would welcome a summit meeting of the leaders of Russia and Ukraine or technical-level negotiations. In its acts, Turkey is guided by logic that one has to think how to reduce temperature instead of inflating the fire.”
He strongly believes that the current conflict can be settled by way of diplomacy.
Before his visit to Kyiv, Erdogan has offered several times to act as a mediator at negotiations of Ukraine with Russia. However, Moscow has turned down his mediatory efforts.
Ukraine does believe that Turkey can be a new mediator since it has normal relations with the Russian Federation. Besides, Ankara feels concerned about the destiny of Crimea. Such position will make it possible to discuss during talks with Moscow not only the war in the east of Ukraine but also the release of Crimean political prisoners and the de-occupation of the annexed peninsula.
Several important bilateral documents were signed during the visit of the Turkish President to Kyiv. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the treaty on a free trade zone between Ukraine and Turkey a historic one. It took fifteen years to reach agreement on the basic provisions of the treaty.
According to Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, the free trade treaty provides for the duty-free export of 95% of Ukrainian goods to Turkey. “This amounts to more than 10 thousand sales items,” Shmyhal said. Kyiv and Ankara expect that the bilateral goods turnover will increase to 10 billion dollars annually in the nearest term due to free trade.
The visit of the Turkish President is expected to promote bilateral cooperation in the defense sector. Thus, an agreement was signed on cooperation in the sphere of high technologies. The agreement provides for the construction of a Bayraktars-building plant in Ukraine. Besides, there are plans to create a training center for preparing specialists to pilot these drones.
For many years, Ukraine and Turkey have been working productively in the industrial, defense and naval spheres. The Ukrainian company “Motor Sich” supplies engines for Turkish strike drones while the armed forces of Ukraine buy Bayraktars TB2 drones. Also, Turkey is currently building a state-of-the-art corvette for the Ukrainian navy.
The newspaper Voice of Ukraine
