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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday he discussed possible ways of ending the war between Ukraine and Russia in a trilateral meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy and U.N. chief Antonio Guterres.
Speaking after the meeting in Ukraine’s Lviv, Erdogan said they discussed using the positive atmosphere created by a U.N.-brokered grain export deal to establish lasting peace.
He also said they discussed the exchange of prisoners of war between Ukraine and Russia, and that he would later raise the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We attach great importance to this issue…of what happened to the exchange of these captives,” Erdogan said.
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Zelenskiy told Guterres that this “deliberate and cynical terror on the part of the aggressor could have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine and the whole world”, according to a statement released by the office of the president. They agreed that an IAEA mission “must be carried out in a legal way through a territory free from occupiers”.
Kyiv accuses Moscow, whose forces captured the nuclear plant in March, of using it as a shield from which it shells Ukrainian targets. While Moscow says Ukraine is the one shelling the facility, Kyiv blames Russian forces.
During the meeting, Guterres also told Zelenskiy of a UN fact-finding mission to Olenivka, “where Russia committed a cynical terrorist attack against Ukrainian prisoners of war,” the statement reads. Zelenskiy asked Guterres also to investigate “the issue of compliance by the Russian side with the agreements reached in the context of the withdrawal of Ukrainian defenders from Azovstal”.
