One of the key stages of the Russian-Turkish dialogue on the implementation of the Turkish Stream project this year will be the autumn meeting of the two presidents, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov reported.
"A bilateral supreme council will meet in the fall, at the highest level. Putin and Erdogan will meet, one thing that they have agreed to in the course of their last telephone conversation is that they will additionally coordinate the time. The location will also be specified. Of course, Turkish Stream will certainly be discussed," RIA Novosti quoted Peskov as saying.
A spokesman for the Russian president, commenting on the information about the suspension of negotiations on the Turkish Stream, said that in the process there are "no new elements" because of the internal political problems of Turkey. "There is nothing to comment about Turkish Stream. In order to implement such projects, Turkey must complete the process of forming a government. So we are waiting patiently," he said.
Previously, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak had denied rumors of the project being frozen by Turkish side. "We have no official statements or appeals from the Turkish side, we continue to work on the intergovernmental agreement. And as far as I know, the Turkish side also continues to consider this project," the Minister reported.
The director of the Center for International Energy Market Studies of the Institute of Energy Research of y Russian Academy of Sciences, Vyacheslav Kulagin, told Vestnik Kavkaza about what is happening around Turkish Stream. First of all, he recalled that the negotiations are difficult because of the desire of Turkey to have a single gas pipeline that will provide its own needs. "When it is about other branches, and about the fact that these amounts should be supplies to Europe, disagreements start, including those caused by the fact that our Turkish colleagues want to obtain more favorable conditions for Russian gas supply in exchange for a decision on the construction of pipelines and the issuance of all relevant permits, in other words an additional discount to the price at which gas is bought by Turkish companies," the expert noted.
