Türkiye is sending its foreign minister to Paris on Monday, and it is going with a specific job in mind. Hakan Fidan will represent President Erdoğan at the Coalition of the Willing summit on Ukraine, and according to Foreign Ministry sources, Ankara expects to take the lead on the coalition's maritime work once the group settles its legal and political framework. For a country that controls the entrance to the Black Sea, that is the lane that fits.
The summit itself is a large one. The Élysée said the 13 July meeting in Paris will gather more than two dozen heads of state and government alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa also attending. Western reporting put the coalition at around 37 nations after Moldova and North Macedonia joined, and the agenda the French presidency laid out runs to Russia's "shadow fleet," new military capabilities for Ukraine, and a bigger push from Europe's defense industry.
Türkiye has been in the room since the start. Britain and France launched the Coalition of the Willing in March 2025 to build security guarantees for a lasting Ukrainian peace, and Ankara has taken part in its activities from the founding. Fidan stood in for Erdoğan at the coalition's Paris summit on 6 January this year; Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz did the same at an online session on 24 February, the third anniversary of the invasion.
What Fidan carries into this one, the Foreign Ministry laid out in advance. He is expected to reaffirm Türkiye's support for Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to give Ankara's read on the state of the front and on the diplomacy aimed at ending the war. He is also expected to repeat the offer Türkiye has kept on the table throughout: that it is ready to bring Russian and Ukrainian delegations back around a negotiating table, and that peace and stability in the Black Sea matter to Türkiye directly.
That last point is where the maritime role starts to make sense. The Black Sea is Türkiye's sea as much as anyone's, its two straits are the only way in or out, and the coalition's naval questions, the shadow fleet included, run through waters Ankara has spent the war managing under the Montreux Convention. Leading the maritime strand would formalize a position geography already hands Türkiye.
None of it is signed yet. The naval leadership is contingent on the coalition agreeing the legal and political framework its members are still drafting, and Fidan is expected to press for close coordination while that work continues. The summit also lands days after Ankara hosted the NATO summit that Zelenskyy attended, and Fidan is set to take up what the decisions there mean for Ukraine.
So Monday is a preview more than a result. Türkiye arrives as a founding member angling for a defined job, in the one domain where its map does the arguing for it.
Update, 14 July. The summit went ahead at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris on Monday, co-chaired by Macron with Britain's Keir Starmer and Germany's Friedrich Merz, and Fidan attended in Erdoğan's place, Türkiye's Foreign Ministry confirmed. Its headline result was a new anti-ballistic missile coalition: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom agreed to build what they called a shared anti-ballistic missile capacity for Europe and to back Ukraine's home-grown Freya air-defense system, a would-be rival to the American Patriot. The leaders also promised more arms, multinational training, tighter sanctions on Russia, and help for Ukraine's power grid before winter, and Britain said it would join the European Union's roughly $100 billion loan to keep Kyiv supplied.
Türkiye was not among the nine names on the missile coalition, and nothing announced in Paris formalized the maritime role Ankara had flagged going in. That job, leading the coalition's naval and Black Sea work, still waits on the legal and political framework the group is drafting, which is where it stood on Sunday. Fidan's presence kept Türkiye in the room and on the record. The definition of its part is still to come.