Return Crimea to its “rightful owner”: Erdoğan says
Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Russian President Vladimir Putin must return all land that Russia has occupied, including Crimea to their rightful owners.
The Black Sea peninsula should be returned to its “rightful owners,” Erdoğan said in an interview with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Asked whether Russia should be allowed to keep Crimea in a negotiated end to the war, Erdoğan replied, “These are our descendants at the same time, the people who are living there. If you were to take this step forward, if you could leave us, you would be relieving the Crimean Tatars and Ukraine as well. That’s what we have always been saying”.
Erdoğan said he had been telling Putin this since 2014. “But since then, unfortunately, no step has been taken forward”, he added.
The remarks make him the latest world leader with continuing ties to Russia to deal Putin a rhetorical blow in recent days. I
India’s Narendra Modi raised concerns last week about the Russian president’s ongoing war on Ukraine, and Putin himself admitted China’s Xi Jinping expressed “concerns” as well.
Crimean Tatars have ethnic, linguistic, and historic ties to Turkey, and it was a protectorate of the Ottoman empire until it was annexed by the Russian empire in 1783.
In the interview, Erdoğan continued to present Turkey, which is a member of NATO, as a neutral party in the Russia-Ukraine war, saying that a conclusion to hostilities would not be reached by “taking sides.” However, he also said that Russia’s “invasion cannot be justified”.
Return Crimea to its “rightful owner”: Erdoğan says
Since the war began in February, Ankara has hosted talks with officials from Moscow and Kyiv at the highest level and mediated a grain deal alongside the UN to ensure safe food exports out of blockaded Ukrainian ports, though some Western diplomats suspect Turkey of playing a double game.
