This is an excerpt from Turkey Briefing, Al-Monitor's weekly newsletter covering the big stories of the week in Turkey. To get Turkey Briefing in your inbox, sign up here.
ANKARA — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan struck an optimistic tone on several potential breakthroughs between Moscow and Kyiv as he hosted his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Istanbul on Friday.
At a crucial time, Zelenskyy paid his second visit to the country since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The trip comes merely a week after Russia’s top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, visited the NATO member as Ankara is on a fresh mission to find compromise between Moscow and Ukraine on a range of issues.
“There are three important issues here. One of them is food safety,” Erdogan said during the joint presser following roughly an hour of talks, in reference to ensuring the safety of exports of Ukrainian grain and other food products. “Another is a prisoner exchange. Another is maritime safety [in the Black Sea].”
