The presidents of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and Turkey, Recep Erdogan, will meet in the Russian city of Sochi on Monday, September 4, a Turkish diplomatic source told the Russian TASS agency on Thursday.
“For the moment, the meeting is scheduled for September 4,” said the Turkish diplomatic source.
Turkish leaders have not yet announced the official date of Erdogan’s visit to Russia, the official Russian news agency added.
A spokesman for Erdogan’s party said on Friday that the Turkish leader planned to talk to Putin about resuming the grain export deal that Russia withdrew from in July.
“Soon, [Erdogan] will visit Sochi. We believe that there may be news after this visit,” Omer Celik said last week, quoted by the French agency AFP.
Turkey is one of the parties to the agreements that the UN signed in July 2022 with Moscow and Kiev to allow the export of cereals through the Black Sea that were withheld due to the Russian war against Ukraine.
In July this year, Russia ended the agreement, claiming that Western sanctions imposed on it for invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022 prevented it from exporting grain and agricultural fertilizers.
Since then, Moscow has threatened to attack ships sailing from Ukrainian Black Sea ports. Ukraine now relies on land routes and a shallow river port, which severely limits the volume of exports.
Since pulling out of the deal, Russia has attacked Ukraine’s grain infrastructure, earning it accusations from Ukraine and the West of worsening world food insecurity.
Before the war, Ukraine and Russia together supplied 28% of the world’s wheat, 29% of barley, 15% of corn and 75% of sunflower oil, according to the British magazine The Economist.
In one year, the Black Sea initiative allowed the departure of about 33 million tons of grain and other food products from three Ukrainian ports to 45 countries.
Turkey is trying to revive the original agreement in the hope of using it as a springboard for broader peace talks between kyiv and Moscow, according to AFP.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Friday during a visit to kyiv that he saw “no alternative” to reviving the original deal.
Russian diplomacy announced Fidan’s visit to Moscow today and Friday, during which he will be received by his counterpart Serguei Lavrov.
The situation in Ukraine will be at the center of the debates, as will “Syria, Libya and the Caucasus,” said the spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zajárova, on Wednesday.
Source: TSF
