Turkish President Erdogan announces Russian President Putin's visit to Turkey in August

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday announced an official visit by Vladimir Putin to the country in August where the former will push Russia to extend a Black Sea grain deal by at least three months.

The announcement came as Erdogan was addressing the media in a joint press conference with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Here the two parties met to discuss the fate of an arrangement, brokered last year by Turkey and the United Nations, to allow for the safe export of grain from Ukrainian ports via the Black Sea despite the war.

The Turkish president said that the country is currently working out a way to extend the Black Sea grain deal beyond its expiration date of July 17. Among other things, a discussion on the grains deal will be the most important agenda of Erdogan’s meeting with Putin.

“Our hope is that it will be extended at least once every three months, not every two months. We will make an effort in this regard and try to increase the duration of it to two years,” he said at the news conference with Zelenskyy.

Apart from this, Zelenskyy was also able to bag crucial support from Turkey in its bid to join NATO after the country won a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.

Both men said they had also discussed another key question for Erdogan’s talks with Putin — the question of prisoner exchanges, which Zelenskiy said had been the first thing on their agenda. “I hope we will get a result from this soon,” Erdogan said.

With inputs from agencies