UN bid to break Cyprus deadlock

Stakeholders in the Cyprus issue held a series of meetings in New York throughout Thursday, followed by a working lunch hosted by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and rounded off with a final plenary discussion of all the parties.

The plenary session began around 6.30pm (Cyprus time) at UN headquarters. Chaired by Guterres, the meeting featured the heads of the participating delegations in the enlarged talks: President Nikos Christodoulides; Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar; the foreign ministers of Greece and Turkey, Giorgos Gerapetritis and Hakan Fidan, respectively; and the UK’s minister of state for Europe Stephen Doughty.

The Greek Cypriot delegation included Foreign Minister Konstantinos Kombos, government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis, Deputy Minister for European Affairs Marilena Raouna, the lead Greek Cypriot negotiator Menelaos Menelaou, and legal expert Achilleas Emilianides.

According to the schedule, this was set to wrap up around 8.30pm, after which the delegations sat down for a working lunch.

Later, there followed the final session of the plenary, expected to finish around midnight.

Prior to the plenary, the UN chief held separate meetings with the heads of each delegation.

Christodoulides met with the UK’s Doughty at around 3pm.

For his part, Tatar also saw Guterres and then Doughty. The Turkish Cypriot leader made no comments to the press coming out of those meetings.

Tatar was accompanied by his ‘foreign minister’ Tahsin Ertugruloglu, his special representative Gunes Onar, legal advisor Sulen Karabacak, as well as other officials.

A UN spokesperson meanwhile described the proceedings as an “informal meeting, a dialogue”.

Stephanie Tremblay, associate spokesperson for the Secretary-General, refused to be drawn on what the UN expected of the enlarged meeting.

“They’ve just gone into the plenary, and I won’t speculate on the result, they just started and you’ll have more to hear once it wraps up later today,” she told reporters.

“It’s an informal meeting, a dialogue, and I’ll leave it at that for now.”

In a statement after the separate meeting between the Cypriot president and the UN chief, the government said Christodoulides thanked Guterres for his “personal commitment” to efforts to restart Cyprus peace talks and for convening the enlarged meeting of the parties in New York.

During his tete-a-tete with Guterres, Christodoulides “stressed the readiness of the Republic of Cyprus to restart substantive negotiations from the point where they left off in 2017” and underlined Cyprus’ commitment to UN Security Council resolutions concerning Cyprus, which are “the cornerstone for any process to resolve the Cyprus problem”.

Earlier, Christodoulides held separate talks with the Turkish foreign minister. According to Turkish news outlet TRHaber, the two discussed EU-Turkey relations in light of Cyprus’ upcoming presidency of the Council of Europe in January 2026.

Meanwhile Turkish newspaper Turkiye reported that, following the dinner held on the first day (Wednesday in New York) of the enlarged meeting, Tatar stated that the “unjust isolation” of the Turkish Cypriots needed to end.

According to the same newspaper, Tatar was set to present proposals for ending the “restrictions” placed on the Turkish Cypriot side.

The Turkish Cypriot leader was quoted as saying: “Since there exist two peoples on the island and since you wish for a solution, a road map must be laid out based on political equality and equal status…the will of the Turkish Cypriot people cannot be ignored.”

For his part, the UN chief stated that the status quo on Cyprus “is not viable.” He added that confidence-building measures were on the table.

The two-day conference in New York is being held in hopes of keeping the peace process alive.

It’s the second enlarged meeting of the year, the first having taken place in Geneva in March.

Greece, Turkey and Britain are the guarantor powers for Cyprus, under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee.

The current meetings at the seat of the UN focused on the issue of potential confidence-building measures, with the matter of crossing points and a potential solar farm in the buffer zone also expected to be discussed.

The Turkish Cypriot side was also expected to raise the matter of the arrests made by the Republic of Cyprus of people accused of selling and developing Greek Cypriot-owned land in the north. Tatar had previously described those arrests as “terrorism”.