- Erdogan to visit Moscow
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Moscow on Mar. 9 on the sidelines of Turkey-Russia high-level cooperation council meeting.
Erdogan is expected to meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin while a large number of officials from both sides will also attend the meeting.
The meeting, which takes place every year in Russia and Turkey, was cancelled last year due to the jet crisis that occurred on Nov. 24 in 2015, which brought bilateral relations to a standstill.
While Syria and energy issues are expected to be on the top of the meeting’s agenda, the ban on Turkish workers in Russia and the restriction on Turkish companies taking place in tenders on Russian soil will also be discussed between the two presidents.
Meanwhile, sanctions on some Turkish food products and the one-sided Russian visa regime for Turkish citizens are still upheld.
- Russia increases oil production
According to data released by Russia's statistics service Rosstat, the country’s oil production in January this year increased by 2.4 percent to 46.1 million tons, compared with a year earlier.
In November last year, OPEC members unanimously agreed to lower oil production by 1.2 million barrels per day. Consequently, eleven non-OPEC oil producers agreed to cut oil output to achieve market stability at the joint ministerial meeting in December 2016.
Russia pledged to lower oil production by 300,000 barrels per day in compliance with the agreement reached by OPEC and non-OPEC producers. The country reduced its daily production by 120 thousand barrels in