SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to Russia’s Sochi on Monday to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, the state-owned Anadolu News Agency reported.
During his day-long working visit to the coastal city of Russia, Turkey’s Erdogan will discuss current regional and global issues, as well as Turkey-Russian relations with Putin, Anadolu said.
Erdogan will try to convince Kremlin chief Putin to return to a Ukraine grain export deal that helped ease a global food crisis, when the two leaders meet, according to Turkish reports.
Russia quit the deal in July – a year after it was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey – complaining that its own food and fertiliser exports faced obstacles and that not enough Ukrainian grain was going to countries in need.
The deal was aimed at getting grain from Ukraine to world markets through the Black Sea and easing a global food crisis that the United Nations said had been worsened by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
Russia and Ukraine are two of the world’s key agricultural producers, and major players in the wheat, barley, maize, rapeseed, rapeseed oil, sunflower seed and sunflower oil markets.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the talks with Erdogan, who previously played a significant role in convincing Putin to stick with the deal, would take place in the middle of the day, Moscow time.
“We play a leading role here,” Erdogan’s chief foreign policy and security advisor Akif Cagatay Kilic said in an interview on A Haber television channel.
“The current status (of the grain deal) will be discussed at the summit on Monday. We are cautious, but we hope to achieve success,” Kilic said.
