American President Joe Biden and his administration actually support our country’s request regarding the sale of F-16s, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in his statements upon his return to Turkey from Vilnius.

“Right now both he and the foreign minister said ‘we are dealing with the matter, we are monitoring it,'” Erdogan said, according to SKAI Istanbul correspondent Manolis Kostidis, adding that our foreign minister, Hakan Fidan and the head of the Turkish secret services, Ibrahim Kalin, in the same way will make sure that this process turns to our advantage by meeting their interlocutors,” Erdogan said.

The Turkish president also said that he received positive messages from the EU about the customs union: “We sent my adviser Mr. Çağkatai. They will have discussions on these issues there. He will discuss both the Customs Union issue and visa liberalization issues. I believe these will be in favor of Turkey. Ursula von der Leyen also told us some positive things about it today. I think my advisor will come back from there with positive developments.

Because at the last Summit of Heads of State and Government, it was the right step to ask the High Representative and the Commission to prepare a report on Turkey-European Union relations. I expect the report to be prepared in a positive and forward-looking manner.

With the EU as Turkey, we always stand behind our promises, and we do. We want to see the tangible results of negotiations conducted on the ‘kazan-kazan’ (win-win) principle as soon as possible. The specific steps regarding the promises made are primarily the termination of the activities of terrorist organizations in the countries in question and the extradition of terrorists. As a result of the positive projects we will see from the European Union, we will start working to implement the promises we have made.

The process has come to this day as the issues agreed last year have not been implemented. After that, we take action according to the implementation of the promises made. We made it clear to our interlocutors that we are uncompromising on this issue.”

Tours to Gulf countries

Erdogan announced a tour of Gulf countries: “We have hopes in this visit. I sent my associates earlier. They visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates. We will go with a delegation. We would like to further strengthen all kinds of relations between us by traveling to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In fact, Mohammed bin Zayed called today. They wonder. What happened, how did it go? We said, we’ll be with you on Wednesday. We will discuss them in detail there.’ We will go there from Qatar, we will go to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and I am optimistic. During the preliminary visits, the friends gave us some information. During our visit we will have the opportunity to see and experience personally the support they will give to Turkey.”

Erdogan’s response to Biden’s message

As Turkey, we will continue to support the enlargement of NATO and the strengthening of our alliance with sincerity, a sense of responsibility and an attitude of principle. I believe that our Alliance’s creation of strong solutions against all security challenges, especially the fight against terrorism, and the strengthening of ties between allies will play an important role in consolidating regional and global peace. We will maintain our constructive stance as long as Turkey’s legitimate security concerns and regional and global initiatives are shaped on a “win-win” basis. Thank you, Mr. President, for your personal support, well wishes and congratulations to the Alliance