The impeachment of Robert Menendez is an opportunity for Turkey to advance the F16 case in the US Congressthe Turkish president told reporters, Tayyip Erdogan upon his return from Azerbaijan, as reported by the SKAI correspondent from Istanbul, Manolis Kostidis

In particular, Erdogan stated that:

“One of our major concerns regarding the F-16s has been the activities of US Senator Bob Menendez against our country. Therefore, our Secretary of State Hakan Fidan will now closely monitor this process. In fact, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and our Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met in America three or four days ago. These talks are still ongoing. But now, it would be beneficial to turn this situation into an opportunity and meet with him again.”

That way, we might have an opportunity to speed up the process on the F-16s. Not only on the F-16s, but on all other issues, Menendez and those with his mentality are doing obstructionist actions against us. Menendez’s exit gives us an advantage, but the F-16 issue is not a Menendez-only issue. Our Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan will manage the areas that need to be managed.

We are now awaiting a clear response from the US on this issue. We hope that we will have the positive result we expect without much delay. Even this issue shows us how important it is to be a self-sufficient country in terms of defense industry. We were in the same situation before regarding UAV-SİHA. Then the Predator thing was happening. Even though we needed it, we couldn’t get it from our ally. What have we done; We built our own UAVs. We didn’t stop, we made SİHA, we made TİHA, we made Kızılelma, we made Hürkuş, we made Atak… Tright now we need F-16, but on the other hand, we are working on the production of our new generation fighter plane, Kaan.”