Erdogan invited Kyiv and Moscow to jointly investigate the breakthrough of the dam of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed the creation of a commission with the participation of Russian, Ukrainian experts, as well as the UN and Turkey to investigate the circumstances of the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam. He made this proposal during telephone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky. A message about the conversation between Putin and Erdogan was also published on the Kremlin website.

During the conversation, the Russian leader noted that Kyiv, at the suggestion of Western states, is betting on the escalation of violence in Ukraine, using terrorist methods, and also commits sabotage on the territory of Russia. “A good example is the barbaric action to destroy the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station in the Kherson region, which led to a large-scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophe,” the Russian president’s website says.

In turn, Erdogan said that Ankara is ready to make a feasible contribution to the formation of a joint commission, emphasizing the importance of an impartial investigation into the explosion at the dam of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station. In addition, the Turkish President attached particular importance to the issue of extending the grain deal, which ends on July 17. He added that the agreement reached by joint efforts plays an important role in eliminating the “global food crisis”.

The dam of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station located above Kherson was partially destroyed on June 6. After that, a massive discharge of water downstream from the Kakhovka reservoir began, coastal settlements with a total population of more than 40,000 people were flooded. Moscow called the incident a deliberate sabotage by the Ukrainian side. According to the statement of the administration of the Kherson region, the dam was subjected to shelling by the Ukrainian army for a long time and after another blow began to collapse. On June 7, Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev said that a day before the accident, Kyiv began to dump water from the Dnieper hydroelectric power station, exacerbating the detrimental consequences. The Ukrainian authorities blamed the incident on Russia.

If you try to conduct an objective international investigation of what happened, it is necessary to involve a disinterested and not directly involved in the conflict side, which Turkey and its president position themselves to be, says Kirill Semenov, an expert at the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs. According to him, the main thing for Erdogan is that he has demonstrated his role as a peacemaker, while the implementation of his initiative is hardly possible. Erdogan is also interested in extending the grain deal from a diplomatic, media and economic point of view, Semyonov believes.