Ulrike Flader on Turkey at the Crossroads

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Glossary

Ukraine Grain Deal (Black Sea Grain Initiative)

(04:50 or p.2 in the transcript)

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian exports of grain have been severely disrupted. For over four months, Russian military vessels blocked Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea. On 22 July 2022, an agreement was brokered by the United Nations and Türkiye to open a safe maritime humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea (the Black Sea Grain Initiative). Since then, over 1 080 ships full of grain and other foodstuffs have left three Ukrainian ports: Chornomorsk, Odesa and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi. As of May 2023, over30 million tonnes of grain and other foodstuffs have been exported via the Black Sea Grain Initiative. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP – the largest humanitarian organisation in the world) is also shipping wheat from Black Sea ports. Before the war, the programme bought half of its grain stock from Ukraine. Since the start of the initiative in August 2022 over 625 000 tonnes of wheat have left Ukrainian ports to Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti. source

Syrian refugee population in Turkey

(14:30 or p.4 in the transcript)

Just over 3.5 million UNHCR-registered Syrian refugees currently live in Turkey, comprising the largest registered refugee population in the world. Hundreds of thousands of unregistered Syrian refugees are also estimated to live in Turkey, although the exact number is highly uncertain due to their legal status and heightened risk of deportation. Refugees began fleeing to Turkey in small numbers at the outset of the civil war in 2011, but the largest waves arrived in 2015 and 2016, when a series of brutal offensives by the Syrian regime – backed by the Russian air force and Iranian-funded militias – retook the largest rebel-held cities in northern and central Syria.  Although the number of registered Syrian refugees in Turkey has remained relatively static since 2018, there has been significant change under the surface. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have continued to arrive since 2018, displaced by the regime’s airstrikes in rebel-held Idlib and its offensives to retake the country’s south. These arrivals have been offset by the roughly half a million refugees who have returned to Syria from Turkey since the war started.source