Daily Times

Istanbul: Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has asked Turkey to be a guarantor of any future deal with Russia, along with the UN Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany, Ankara’s top diplomat said Thursday.

“Ukraine made an offer on the collective security agreement: P5 (the UN Security Council’s five permanent members), Turkey and Germany,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said during a visit to the Ukrainian city of Lviv.

“I saw that the Russian Federation had no objection and could accept such an offer,” he added, referring to his meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow on Wednesday.

The five permanent UN Security Council members are China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States.

Cavusoglu said ceasefire hopes in the conflict between Kyiv and Moscow had “increased” following his diplomacy in Russia and Ukraine.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke by telephone with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Thursday to repeat his offer of hosting a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ankara or Istanbul.

Erdogan also underlined “the necessity of opening humanitarian corridors” to allow civilians to flee the fighting, the Turkish presidency said in a statement.

Turkey, which has close ties with Ukraine and Russia, has tried to position itself as a mediator in the three-week-old conflict.

Last week, it hosted the first high-level meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers since the war began in the southern resort city of Antalya.