ANKARA — Newly appointed Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan named the ministry’s spokesperson Tanju Bilgic as his country’s new ambassador to Moscow on Friday, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu News Agency reported.
Bilgic’s appointment, which will become official after its publication on the Official Gazette, coincided with the Kremlin's announcement that Russian President Vladimir Putin would soon visit Turkey. Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov said Friday that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin agreed on the visit and that planning was underway without giving a timeline, Russia’s Interfax reported.
Bilgic, who previously served as Turkey's ambassador to Belgrade, will replace Mehmet Samsar, who has held the post since 2019 and overseen a tense chapter between the Turkish-Russian ties that saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the start of high-level political talks between Ankara and Damascus and the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Bilgic's tenure will likely see swift developments on these files. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova listed them as priority agenda items in the two countries’ ties.
