Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu participated in the NATO Foreign Ministers Meeting held via videoconference on 1-2 December 2020.
On the first day of the meeting, in addition to the issues on NATO’s agenda, Minister Çavuşoğlu emphasized our views regarding Nagorno-Karabagh, Eastern Mediterranean, Libya as well as the unlawful boarding without Turkey’s consent of a Turkish-flagged commercial vessel in the framework of Operation Irini.
On 2 December 2020, Minister Çavuşoğlu attended the session of NATO Foreign Ministers Meeting on Security in the Black Sea Region with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba and emphasized once again our support to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and Georgia.
Before the videoconference, Minister Çavuşoğlu held a frank meeting with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba of Ukraine.
Minister Çavuşoğlu said that we would continue to strengthen our relations with Ukraine, especially in military cooperation and defense industry, and that we welcomed the “Crimean Platform” initiative.
On the same day morning, Minister Çavuşoğlu also participated in the TRT World Forum held via videoconference under the title of “New Realities in Foreign Affairs and Interstate Relations after Covid-19” together with Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi of Pakistan and Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto of Finland.
Minister Çavuşoğlu noted that the pandemic revealed the weaknesses of the current multilateral system, that it reaffirmed the validity of our call for the reform of international organizations, that recent developments had shown that there was no frozen conflict, that all conflicts could escalate at any moment, and that what was really frozen was their solutions.
In addition, Minister Çavuşoğlu stated that we were concerned about how Europe was increasingly becoming hostage to populist, racist and anti-migrant discourses, that what we needed was vision and moderacy, and that populist and racist discourses were only serving to strengthen radicals and terrorists.
Minister Çavuşoğlu also expressed that recently, Operation Irini had been used as a tool against Turkey, that the boarding of a Turkish flagged commercial vessel without our prior consent had been ordered in the framework of this operation, that this was a clear violation of international law and that we strongly protested this illegal act.
