President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will pay an official visit to Ukraine upon the invitation of Ukranian President Petro Poroshenko in the coming days. While holding official talks in the country, it is expected that Erdoğan will meet with prominent figures from the Crimean Tatar community, an event that constitutes an important moment on the agenda of this visit.
Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç informed the press about the visit at a press conference following the Cabinet meeting chaired by Erdoğan on Monday, March 9. Arınç said that "President Erdogan will visit Ukraine in the coming days. In this regard, various aspects of Russian-Ukrainian and Turkish-Ukrainian relations and the situation in Crimea have been worked on."
Erdoğan's visit to Kiev takes place at a critical time when Ukrainian government troops and Russia-backed separatists have not completely set aside their arms, as the cease-fire agreement that was signed on February 12 is precarious, despite a series of mediating talks and peace efforts. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which monitors the cease-fire, recently protested in recent reports that both parties hindered its observer teams from accessing weapons' sites.
More than 5,300 people have been killed and 12,200 injured in eastern Ukraine since mid-April of last year in the ongoing conflict between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists, the U.N. Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported in February.
Although it is among the countries that did not implement the EU and U.S. economic sanctions imposed on Russia, Turkey opposes Russia's annexation of Crimea and has defended the territorial integrity of Ukraine since the beginning of the crisis. Also, the 280,000 Crimean Tatars in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which constitute roughly 13 percent of the total population, is one of the issues that Turkey is sensitive to, asserting that Crimean Tatars in the region have ethnic and linguistic ties with Turkey.
