İstanbul office
A member of the Security and Foreign Policy Council in the Turkish presidency, Chagri Erhan, said that “Ankara will need Russian investments to build a gas center.”
He noted in a statement, “Negotiations about the center have been suspended, as a lot has changed in Turkey after the earthquakes. All priorities have changed. In principle – yes (Turkey benefits from the center), but now we don’t have the money to build it. If Russia has the money Please, start building the center, it all depends on their investment.”
At the end of last January, the Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Fatih Donmez, announced that an international meeting would be held for gas-consuming and gas-supplying countries from February 14 to 15 at the Gas Center. After the February 6 earthquake, the meeting was temporarily rescheduled for March 22.
Active negotiations on the project were suspended after the devastating earthquakes in southeastern Turkey, and as the sources told “Novosti” agency, negotiations will resume in the near future.
The first talk about the Turkish gas center was last October, then two weeks after the attacks on the “Northern Stream” gas pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the missing volume of Russian gas transit could be transferred to the Black Sea region.
He referred to the opportunity to establish a gas hub in Turkey, which could become a platform for supplies to other countries, especially Europe, as well as to set gas prices, which have grown several times since 2021 – to historical levels.
Turkey responded positively to the proposal to establish a gas hub, and the leaders of the two countries instructed the relevant agencies to start work. However, Europe received the proposal without enthusiasm.