President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are expected to attend the ground-laying ceremony of the 4,800-megawatt nuclear power plant in Akkuyu, Mersin in April.

President Erdogan and President Putin are expected to meet in Turkey in the first week of April. The two leaders will chair the seventh meeting of the Turkish-Russian High-Level Cooperation Council (HLCC).

A number of important political and economic decisions will likely be made at the meeting. The political agenda will focus on the bilateral and regional developments, while the economic agenda will be dominated by energy-defense industry projects and agriculture.

The sixth meeting of the HLCC was held in Moscow last March.

Later, the two leaders will lay the foundation for the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), which will cost an estimated $20 billion.

Following ground-laying ceremony, Erdoğan and Putin will join a summit on the Syrian civil war to be held in Istanbul. The first installment of the summit, which served as the continuation of the Astana talks, was held in Sochi on Nov. 22, 2017. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, one of the guarantors of the Astana peace process, will also attend the summit.

The first unit of the Akkuyu NPP, which will have four reactors, will be launched in 2023, while the other units will be commissioned one by one in the following years. Accordingly, the plant will reach full capacity in 2026.

Consisting of four reactors, each with an installed capacity of 200 megawatts, the plant will annually generate an average of 35 billion kilowatt hours of electricity when it reaches 4,800 megawatts.