Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Thursday that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and U.S. President Donald Trump share a "strong political will" to remove U.S. sanctions imposed on Türkiye under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), adding that both governments are taking concrete steps to resolve one of the most persistent disputes in bilateral ties.
Speaking in an interview with CNN Türk, Fidan said Erdoğan and Trump had instructed their governments to work toward lifting the sanctions following a meeting in Washington last September.
"Both our president and President Trump have a strong will to remove the CAATSA sanctions," Fidan said. "Our defense minister and I have been working intensively on this issue. Overall, relations are moving in a positive direction."
The sanctions were imposed after Türkiye acquired Russia's S-400 missile defense system, leading Washington to remove Ankara from the F-35 fighter jet program in 2019 and later sanction Türkiye's defense procurement agency under CAATSA.
Fidan said the sanctions remain the only major institutional obstacle in U.S.-Türkiye relations, arguing that many other restrictions imposed on Ankara over the past several years had already been lifted.
