State Department denies forming group with Turkey on CAATSA sanctions
After Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu claimed that Ankara and the Washington were setting up a working group on US sanctions on Turkey, a State Department spokesperson denied the existence of any such body.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced Wednesday that the United States had offered to set up what he described as a joint working group on US sanctions on Turkey over its acquisition of a Russian-made missile battery system, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Speaking a day after his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Sochi, Cavusoglu said the initial proposal had come from Ankara. “Now the proposal came from the United States. As we naturally favor dialogue, we said yes, and negotiations began at the level of experts,” he said, according to Anadolu. Cavusoglu did not specify when the group first met, nor who was participating in it.
