Geneva

Official negotiations on the Cyprus issue can start only after the recognition of the sovereign equality of the Turkish side, the Turkish Cypriot president said on June 26.

Ersin Tatar said he reiterated the necessity of acceptance of equal international status during a meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

EU leaders said on June 25 the bloc had rejected a push by Germany and France to relaunch meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin after fierce resistance from member states worried about Moscow's aggressions.

The presidents of Russia and Turkey spoke over the phone on June 24 and discussed bilateral ties, tourism, the Sputnik V vaccine, Nagorno-Karabakh region and Syria, official statements said.

The president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) urged the international community on June 20 to take action to change the status quo in Cyprus to guarantee the rights of the island's Turkish Cypriots.

Turkish Cypriots are in favor of "the new policy", a two-state solution, on Cyprus as decades of negotiations for a federation failed to resolve the Cyprus issue, said the president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC).

The U.N. refugee agency says war, violence, persecution and human rights violations caused nearly 3 million people to flee their homes last year, even though the COVID-19 crisis restricted movement worldwide as countries shut borders and ordered lockdowns.

Putin and Biden announced some practical steps after Geneva summit for coming months.

The summit of the Russian and US presidents, which lasted less than 4 hours, ended better than many predicted.

A joint communique on strategic stability was signed, and the ambassadors of both countries are returning in the coming days to work on bilateral relations.

Putin and Biden met yesterday in Geneva. Before the beginning of the summit, the Russian president stated that there are many issues in the relations between the two countries. However, journalists also had many questions after the meeting. Neither Vladimir Putin nor Joe Biden seemed to be thrilled with such a situation.

The Geneva summit could prove to be an inflection point in Russia-US relations, senior director for European affairs on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) in the Barack Obama administration Charles Kupchan told TASS, commenting on Wednesday's meeting between Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Joe Biden of the United States. 

There was no talk of gazing into Vladimir Putin's "soul" and the Russian president didn't try to gaslight a rookie U.S. leader.

Instead, Putin's first summit with the fifth U.S. president of his tenure, Joe Biden, was about mutual respect - and the meeting in Geneva could, both of them said, lead to a more predictable, if still tense, relationship.