The same week Türkiye pushed its four-year-old free-trade deal with Ukraine through Kyiv's parliament, one of its merchant ships was hit by a drone off Odesa, the captain still missing. That is the Ukraine Hakan Fidan flew into on 15 July: a partnership deepening on paper while the sea between the two countries turns dangerous.
On 14 July the Verkhovna Rada ratified the free-trade agreement Türkiye and Ukraine signed back in February 2022. It had waited four years for that vote. Türkiye's Foreign Ministry welcomed the result the next day. The deal removes tariffs on roughly 90 percent of the trade between the two countries, and it points at the target Erdoğan and Zelenskyy have named more than once, 10 billion dollars in annual commerce. It takes effect once Zelenskyy signs it into law.
Hakan Fidan arrived in Kyiv on 15 July for a two-day visit. Ankara framed the trip around the thing Türkiye has wanted since the first months of the war, a way to stop it. Fidan went to see President Zelenskyy and his Ukrainian counterpart, Andrii Sybiha, who had announced the visit, and the agenda ran well past the ceasefire question into defense, energy, and reconstruction.
Türkiye has spent the war as the party that talks to both sides. It armed Ukraine with Bayraktar drones, kept trading with Russia, upheld the Montreux Convention that governs the straits, and brokered the 2022 grain corridor that let Ukrainian wheat sail out through a blockade. It hosted the direct Russia-Ukraine talks in İstanbul that produced a large prisoner exchange. That record is the reason Ankara can still put itself forward as a venue, and Fidan carried that into Kyiv again.
And this week the other side answered. As Fidan sat with the Ukrainians, the Kremlin said it was open to restarting talks on Ukraine under Turkish mediation, and its spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow was "grateful to the Turkish side." For once, both ends of the war were pointing at the same table.
The Black Sea gave the visit its urgency. Russia has spent days pounding the ports around Odesa, Ukraine has been hunting Russian tankers at sea, and a Turkish-owned merchant ship was hit by a drone off Odesa on 14 July, its captain still missing. The war has moved onto the water that Türkiye guards the entrance to, and the traffic caught in it includes Turkish hulls.
Fidan flew home with the trade deal ratified behind him. Ahead was the harder prize, ending the war, and this week Moscow said out loud that it would sit at a Turkish table to talk about it.