Turkey

ANKARA, March 13 (Reuters) - Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Sunday that talks with the Taliban on operating the Kabul airport were still underway, a day after he met acting Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in southern Turkey. 

Turkey has said it would be open to operating Kabul's Hamid Karzai international airport along with Qatar, following the takeover of Afghanistan by the hardline Islamist Taliban in August, but only if its security demands are met.

ANKARA, March 13 (Reuters) - Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Sunday he hoped progress could be made on evacuating Turks stuck in a mosque in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, adding he had sought help from his Russian counterpart on the issue.

Ukraine has accused Russia of failing to observe ceasefires to allow people to leave Mariupol, a southern city where a blockade has left hundreds of thousands trapped. Russia blames Ukraine for the failure to evacuate people.

ISTANBUL (AP) — Greece’s prime minister kicked off his visit to Istanbul Sunday by attending a service for Orthodox Christians at the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is in Turkey to hold talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a rare meeting between the neighbors who have been at odds over maritime and energy issues, the status of Aegean islands and migration.

ANTALYA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey and Armenia have agreed to press ahead with efforts to establish diplomatic relations “without conditions” and continue the normalization efforts that could lead to the reopening of their shared borders for trade, their foreign ministers said Saturday.

Ararat Mirzoyan met with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, on the sidelines of a diplomacy forum near the Turkish Mediterranean city of Antalya during a rare visit to Turkey.

12 March 2022; MEMO: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the situation in Ukraine has revealed major problems within the United Nations (UN) Security Council. Erdogan noted: "If the world had objected to the occupation of Ukraine in 2014, would we be facing the current outlook? Those who were silent on Crimea in 2014 now speak up, is justice valid only for a part of the world?" referring to Moscow's unilateral annexation of Crimea.

11 March 2022; MEMO: Senior officials from Afghanistan, Qatar and the US held a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum (ADF) that kicked off in Turkiye on Friday Anadolu News Agency reports.

Afghanistan's acting Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, met Qatar's Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani, and Tom West, US special representative for Afghanistan, read an Afghan Foreign Ministry statement.

ANKARA, March 11. /TASS/: Attacks on Russian cultural figures are unacceptable, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the opening ceremony of a diplomatic forum in Antalya on Friday.

"Fascistic actions against people of Russian descent and Russian cultural figures living in the Western world are completely unacceptable. Look at the situation where a philharmonic orchestra director gets fired in Germany as a friend of Putin’s? Is it nonsense? They are banning Dostoevsky's works. Is it nonsense?" Erdogan said.

ANKARA, March 11. /TASS/: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday said the time has come to reform the United Nations.

"The system where the fate of the 193 UN member countries is determined by five countries is unfair," he said. "The system needs to be reformed again."

"When we say that the world is more than five countries, we are trying to protect the rights and shared interests of all humanity," Erdogan continued. "We don’t do it in pursuit of the interests of our country alone."

10 March 2022; MEMO: Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, arrived in Turkiye's southern city of Antalya yesterday ahead of tripartite talks with his Turkish and Ukrainian counterparts.

More than 330 journalists from dozens of countries will cover the upcoming meeting, most notably Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Israel, amid strict security measures imposed by Turkey.

10 March 2022; MEMO: Turkish President, Tayyip Erdogan, told US President, Joe Biden, in a phone call on Thursday that it was past time to lift all "unjust" sanctions on Turkey's defence industry, Reuters reports.

According to a statement from Erdogan's office, he also told Biden that Turkey expected its request to purchase 40 new F-16 fighter jets and modernise its existing fleet to be finalised as soon as possible.