President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. The two leaders discussed the Russia-Ukraine conflict and regional issues, according to media reports. A statement by the Kremlin said Erdoğan and Putin also discussed a landmark meeting in Alaska between the Russian leader and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Türkiye is a close ally of both Russia and Ukraine and has strongly supported peace between the two sides.
The Turkish Presidency's Directorate of Communications said in a statement that Putin thanked Erdoğan for the Istanbul Process, hosting peace talks in the city and Türkiye's overall efforts. Erdoğan, in turn, said Türkiye endorsed all approaches seeking to maintain permanent peace with the participation of "all sides" and closely followed developments regarding the peace process. Erdoğan underlined that Türkiye has sincerely endeavored to ensure a fair peace between the sides since the beginning of the conflict. The directorate said the two sides agreed to sustain their dialogue.
Ankara championed the Trump-Putin summit and subsequent meeting of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump in the company of European leaders as Washington seeks to turn a new page both in relations with Russia and Ukraine and resolve the conflict. In his first comments after the Putin-Trump summit in Alaska, Erdoğan said Saturday that talks have given new momentum to efforts to end the war. "Türkiye stands ready to make every contribution toward the establishment of peace," Erdoğan said last Saturday in a social media post.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron, who joined other European leaders at meetings between Trump and Zelenskyy at the White House, was quoted as saying that Türkiye should be part of a new meeting between all sides after a possible trilateral summit between Trump, Zelenskyy and Putin.
NATO military chiefs were set on Wednesday to discuss the details of eventual security guarantees for Ukraine amid efforts to broker an end to the conflict. But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that "seriously discussing security guarantees without the Russian Federation is a utopia, a road to nowhere.
"We cannot agree that it is now suggested to solve collective security issues without the Russian Federation," he told reporters.
Trump, who spoke Monday with his Russian counterpart, said Putin had agreed to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and accept some Western security guarantees for Ukraine. Lavrov said in their phone call Putin had only told Trump he would "think about raising the level of" talks on Ukraine.
Lavrov said any summit between Putin and Zelenskyy "must be prepared in the most meticulous way" so the meeting does not lead to a "deterioration" of the situation around the conflict. Lavrov also accused European leaders, some of whom also visited the White House on Monday, of making "clumsy attempts" to change the U.S. president's position on Ukraine.
"We have only seen aggressive escalation of the situation and rather clumsy attempts to change the position of the U.S. president," he said, referring to Monday's meeting. "We did not hear any constructive ideas from the Europeans there," Lavrov added.
Lavrov also said the West's "confrontational position, a position to continue the war, does not find understanding in the current U.S. administration, which ... seeks to help eliminate the root causes of the conflict."
