Turkey's Erdogan Says Putin Invited Him to SCO Summit in Uzbekistan in September

ANKARA (Sputnik) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin had invited him to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Uzbekistan in September.

The SCO Summit will take place in the Uzbek city of Samarkand on September 15-16.

"The Shanghai Five will gather in Uzbekistan in September. During our meeting [in Sochi], Mr. Putin also asked me: if there is an opportunity, we will attend a meeting there, I am counting on it. We said: let's be together with those who will join the Shanghai Five as members, observers, or dialogue partners. For example, China will be there, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will be there on the other side. We are aspiring to be there with them. I hope that I will be there too unless something extraordinary happens right now," Erdogan told journalists while on a plane from Sochi.

The two leaders met in the Russian southwestern city of Sochi on Friday to discuss the UN-brokered grain deal with Russia and Ukraine, the TurkStream gas pipeline, the construction of the Akkuyu nuclear power plant, payments in rubles for Russian gas deliveries to Turkey, the situation in the Middle East, and other issues on the agenda.

The SCO is an international organization founded in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Russia, and Uzbekistan. The SCO's observer countries include Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia, while partner countries are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey. The SCO launched the procedure for admitting Iran to the organization and granting dialogue partner status to Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia at the summit in Dushanbe in September 2021.