About the Turkish Stream pipeline, Erdogan said the project would now be executed “as fast as possible”.
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“The NATO Secretary General had spoken to the Turkish Foreign Minister on the night of the attempted coup and later with President Erdogan, strongly condemning the attempted coup and reiterating full support for Turkey’s democratic institutions”.
Turkey-Russia relations were severed past year after Turkey shot down a Russian military jet as it violated Turkish airspace.
The two leaders also said they would discuss one major issue dividing them – the war in Syria – after the news conference.
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation went out of its way Wednesday to insist that Turkey – whose president this week visited Moscow and promised a new level of cooperation with the man he repeatedly called his “dear friend”, Russian President Vladimir Putin – remains a “valued ally” whose alliance membership “is not in question”.
Turkey has formally arrested 16,000 people in connection to the failed coup.
“We are working on that and will settle the issue in the near future”, – Putin added.
Putin had said the two men would discuss how to restore trade and economic ties, and cooperation against terrorism.
The talks focused on Syria, as the two sides chose to establish a mechanism to exchange information on the country, Kalin said, adding that the Russian chief of General Staff was also part of the discussions.
He insisted it would take “painstaking work” and “some time” to return to previous trade levels as Russian Federation rolls back punishing economic sanctions against Ankara, but both sides said they wanted to restart major energy projects hit by the crisis.
The shooting down of the Russian jet led to a freeze in relations of the two countries, including economic sanctions and a bar on Russian tourism to Turkey, which thawed in June after Erdogan wrote to his counterpart and the two later spoke on telephone.
An expert claims that the visit of Erdogan to Saint Petersburg will send strong message to the West meaning as “Ankara has options”.
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Another expert, Amur Gadjiev, a research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that the strained bilateral ties have already dealt a serious blow to Turkey, particularly to its economy.
