Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan on Saturday urged Russia and Ukraine to reach an agreement to end their nearly five-year war, speaking to the state-run Anadolu Agency and public broadcaster TRT on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in Atlanta. “These wars are no longer sustainable. Therefore, Russia and Ukraine must reach an agreement,” Fidan said.

Source: Anadolu Agency

Fidan said the costs of the war had become increasingly difficult to sustain, particularly for European countries, and warned that the conflict has caused major economic and social damage and could expand further if diplomatic efforts fail. He said the closure of the Strait of Hormuz had added significantly to the economic consequences of the Ukraine war by disrupting energy supplies and global trade.

Ankara presented itself as a problem-solver at the two-day meeting, hosted by US secretary of state Marco Rubio as preparation for December's G20 leaders' summit in Miami. Fidan said the ministers held three main sessions on global crises, energy security and supply chains, and pointed to growing bottlenecks in the Black Sea, the Gulf and the Red Sea. His bilateral meetings in Atlanta included Rubio and officials from Russia, the UK, France, Mexico, Germany, the European Union and Saudi Arabia, Anadolu reported.

Source: Anadolu Agency

The call came on the same weekend as a separate, earlier development in Istanbul, where Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed on Saturday to work on a Black Sea grain corridor, and Rubio said in Atlanta that interest was growing in a limited Black Sea ceasefire to protect grain and energy shipments. Türkiye has hosted Russia-Ukraine talks before and keeps channels open to both Moscow and Kyiv.

Fidan acknowledged that discussions involving Russia and the countries backing Ukraine are “not always easy”, but said they are necessary so each side can state its position clearly and look for solutions. What happens next turns on whether the diplomatic calendar — including Ukraine-Russia-US trilateral talks discussed for early November and the Miami G20 summit in December — produces a format both sides will actually sit at.