President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met several counterparts and high-ranking officials on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit he attended in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro that began on Monday. His meetings were mostly with Asian leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping. Separately, he attended a meeting of MIKTA, an inter-regional informal consultation platform between Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Türkiye and Australia.
Erdoğan also held discussions with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the two discussed bilateral relations between their countries as well as regional and global issues.
The Presidency’s Directorate of Communications announced that Erdoğan said work to advance cooperation between the two countries will persist. The Turkish leader also said that Israel’s massacres in Palestine and Lebanon pose a security risk not just for the region but also globally and that stopping Israel and establishing lasting peace in the region would also contribute to global peace.
Turkish media outlets published photos of Erdoğan and fellow leaders at meetings in a friendly atmosphere. One photo shows leaders ignoring protocol rules and sitting next to each other. As they did in the G-20 family photo taken earlier, where all leaders held hands, Erdoğan is seen holding hands with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Pham Minh in an amicable conversation in one photo. Another photo had him holding the arm of Chinese leader Xi Jinping as they were having a candid discussion in the presence of Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek.