Erdogan and Guterres to meet with Zelensky in Lviv on Aug 18

MOSCOW. Aug 17 (Interfax) - During his first visit to Ukraine after February 24, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres to discuss possible steps to resolve the crisis by diplomatic methods, Ukrainian media said with reference to CNN Turk, which, in turn, cited a statement circulated by the Turkish president's Directorate of Communications.

The participants in the trilateral meeting, which will take place in Lviv on Thursday, will discuss potential steps to diplomatically settle the crisis by "increasingly maintaining the activities of the mechanism formed to export the Ukrainian grain to world markets," the Turkish president's Directorate of Communications said on its website.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN secretary general, also confirmed on Tuesday that Guterres would attend the trilateral meeting in Lviv on August 18.

"The secretary-general will then go on to Odessa the next day where he will visit the port which is one of the three being used as part of the Black Sea grain initiative," Ukrainian media quoted Dujarric as saying.

The UN is also expecting a one-on-one meeting to take place between Guterres and Zelensky, he said.

Russia, Turkey and Ukraine signed a UN-brokered agreement in Istanbul on July 22 to open a corridor to export grain from three Ukrainian ports - Chornomorsk, Odesa and Pivdenny (Yuzhny).