The United Kingdom appreciates Turkey’s sincere efforts on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum to bring parties together with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to meet on Thursday, sources said.
Turkey has sought to mediate between Russia and Ukraine and offered on several occasions to host talks.
Maintaining its neutral and balanced stance, Turkey continues its diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the Ukraine conflict, urging all sides to exercise restraint. While Ankara has opposed international sanctions designed to isolate Moscow, it also closed the Bosporus and Dardanelles under a 1936 pact, allowing it to prevent some Russian vessels from passing through the Turkish Straits.
British diplomatic sources said that although there were slight differences in the scale of the responses, Turkey and the U.K. were on the same page in their analysis of Russia's violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty according to international law.
Recalling that Turkey and the U.K. voted in the direction condemning Russia in the resolution on the condemnation bill against Russia at the United Nations General Assembly, sources said they respect differences in the extent of the countries' reactions to Russia.
The sources underlined Ukraine’s right to self-defense, expressing satisfaction with Turkey's practice of preventing warships of the warring parties from passing through the straits in accordance with the Montreux Convention.
Under the 1936 Montreux Convention, NATO member Turkey has control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits linking the Mediterranean and Black seas. The pact gives Ankara the power to regulate the transit of naval warships and to close the straits to foreign warships during wartime and when it is threatened.
The sources said Ukraine used its choice as a liberal democracy in favor of becoming part of the free world and the issue of the country becoming a member of NATO was not relevant to the point reached today.
The British government was imposing economic sanctions, and Parliament was also preparing a number of legislative acts on the freezing of billions of dollars of assets of Russian oligarchs located in the U.K.
The U.K. is shoring Ukraine with defensive weapons, humanitarian assistance aid and economic support. Furthermore, last week, London announced that a full asset freeze and travel ban has been imposed against Alisher Usmanov and Igor Shuvalov, two of Russia’s leading oligarchs with significant interests in the U.K. and close links to the Kremlin.
It asserts that Russia’s assault on Ukraine is an unprovoked, premeditated and needless attack against a sovereign democratic state and that Russian concerns about a threat from NATO encroaching its borders are not valid.
In a recent article by U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson published in The New York Times, he urged countries to do more to help Ukraine defend itself.
“More and more nations are willing to provide defensive equipment. We must act quickly to coordinate our efforts to support the government of Ukraine,” he said, adding, “No matter how long it takes, we must prevent any creeping normalization of what Russia does in Ukraine.”
“We cannot allow the Kremlin to bite off chunks of an independent country and inflict immense human suffering and then creep back into the fold.”
