KYIV: Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, has offered to arbitrate in the conflict over the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant in the conflict-torn Ukraine that has sparked concerns of an atomic catastrophe.
The Turkish president reported that Erdogan informed Putin on Saturday that Turkey “may play a facilitator role in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power facility, as they did in the grain agreement.”
Erdogan and Putin decided during their phone discussion on Saturday to continue their conversation outside of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference in Samarkand on September 15–16, according to the presidency.
There was no quick mention, meanwhile, of Erdogan’s Saturday phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he offered to mediate.
On Friday, Ukraine asserted that it had struck a Russian facility in the neighboring town of Energodar and destroyed three artillery pieces as well as a supply of ammunition.
Ukraine, one of the largest grain exporters in the world, was forced to halt almost all shipments after Russia invaded in late February, sparking concerns about a global food crisis. In July, Kyiv and Moscow signed a deal for the resumption of grain exports across Black Sea ports with the United Nations and Turkey serving as guarantors.
When Erdogan visited Lviv to meet with the Ukrainian president last month, he issued a nuclear disaster warning. A reference to the worst nuclear accident ever, which occurred in another area of Ukraine in 1986 while it was still a part of the Soviet Union, the Turkish leader said he wished to prevent “another Chernobyl.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) sent a 14-person team to Zaporizhzhia this week, and its director Rafael Grossi claimed that violence had damaged the plant.
Six IAEA inspectors would stay behind for a few days, and two more would stay “on a permanent basis,” according to Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s representative to Vienna.
