Turkey backs Ukraine’s Nato membership

President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday secured Turkey’s crucial backing for Ukraine’s Nato aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his Ukrainian counterpart on Friday that Kyiv deserved to join Nato, but also urged it to enter peace talks with Moscow, reports AFP.

“There is no doubt that Ukraine deserves membership of Nato,” Erdogan told a joint media appearance with the Ukrainian president, adding that “both sides should go back to peace talks”.

Erdogan further said that he was pressing Russia to extend a Black Sea grain deal by at least three months and announced a visit by President Vladimir Putin in August, reports Reuters.

Meanwhile, Russian artillery shelling killed at least eight civilians and wounded another five in Lyman in Ukraine’s Donetsk region yesterday, on the 500th day since Russia’s invasion, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor, said.

Zelensky hailed “brave” Ukraine as the war’s toll mounted.

He published on social media an undated video clip of a visit to Snake Island in the Black Sea — a symbol of Ukraine’s defiance against Russia.

“Today we are on Snake Island, which will never be conquered by the occupiers, like the whole of Ukraine, because we are the country of the brave,” he said.

“I want to thank from here, from this place of victory, each of our soldiers for these 500 days,” he said in the video, which showed him arriving on the island by boat and leaving flowers.

On the Black Sea grain deal, Erdogan said work was underway on extending the deal beyond its expiration date of July 17 and for longer periods beyond that. The deal would be one of the most important issues on the agenda for his meeting with Putin in Turkey next month.

“Our hope is that it will be extended at least once every three months, not every two months. We will make an effort in this regard and try to increase the duration of it to two years,” he said at the news conference with Zelenskiy.

Both men said they had also discussed another key question for Erdogan’s talks with Putin — the question of prisoner exchanges, which Zelenskiy said had been the first thing on their agenda. “I hope we will get a result from this soon,” Erdogan said.

Zelenskiy said he would wait for a result to comment but made clear the discussion had gone into specifics on returning all captives including children deported to Russia and other groups.

“We are working on the return of our captives, political prisoners, Crimean Tatars,” he said, referring to members of Ukraine’s Muslim community in the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. “Our partners have all the lists. We are really working on this.”

Erdogan said the issue could also come up in his contacts with Putin before his visit. “If we make some phone calls before that, we will discuss it on the call as well,” he said.

The shelling in Lyman took place at about 10:00 am (0700 GMT) and a residential area in the small city was hit.

“A house and a shop were damaged. Police are working on the site,” he said on the Telegram messaging app.

The city of Lyman is a key railway junction in the eastern Donetsk region. The Ukrainian military said in its daily military update that it had repelled Russian troops’ assault attempts near Lyman.