Russian President Vladimir Putin has been left uncomfortable in a room in front of a crowd of journalists as he waits to meet with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Images taken before Tuesday’s meeting show Putin moving, shifting his weight and throwing a series of awkward faces in front of the cameras for nearly a minute before being finally received by Erdogan.
It was unfamiliar ground for the Russian leader, who has developed a reputation for making world leaders wait, by the way, sometimes for hours after the start of scheduled talks. Some speculated that it could have been the recovery of a 2020 meeting in Moscow that saw Erdogan wait so long to enter the meeting room he sat down.
Journalists captured the moment Putin entered the room on Tuesday in hopes that Erdogan would follow his example quickly. Instead, he stood in the middle of the sound of the camera shutters.
With his hands clasped in front of him, the generally stoic Russian leader was seen shuffling his feet and sucking his cheeks for 50 seconds of waiting. Finally, Putin dropped his hands to his sides with a touch of exasperation as Erdogan came out casually and the couple shook hands.
“Those 50 seconds that Erdogan made Putin wait, looking tired in front of the cameras, say a lot about how much he has changed after Ukraine,” said Joyce Karam, chief correspondent for the Middle East media organization National News. in a post on Twitter.
Karam called the exchange a “sweet recovery” for Erdogan after Putin left the Turkish leader waiting about two minutes before a meeting in 2020. At the time, Turkish media reported that Erdogan and his entourage were they were humiliated after being forced to wait outside in an anteroom in images widely shared by the Russian media.
Erdogan has led efforts to negotiate a deal to allow thousands of tons of grain being blocked by Russia to leave Ukrainian ports.
Turkey, a member of NATO, has a special responsibility under the 1936 Montreux Convention with respect to naval traffic entering the Black Sea. He proposes that Russia allow Ukrainian grain ships to leave Odessa by designated routes as long as it is verified that the ships do not carry weapons.
Although Putin praised the Turkish leader for mediating the talks, saying some progress had been made, he was less impressed with Erdogan’s ambitions to build a buffer zone south of the Turkish-Syrian border.
Erdogan claims that the buffer zone would protect Turkey from attacks by Syrian Kurds and maintains that “it is not possible to expect Turkey to remain inactive and out of this problem.”
Some have speculated that Putin’s delay in meeting with international leaders is a calibrated psychological policy dating back to the early days of his presidency. Putin arrived at the queen 14 minutes late in 2003, and a year earlier kept the parents of children dead in a plane crash waiting for two hours in a cemetery.
Putin appeared an hour late at his meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican in June 2015.
In 2018, then-US President Donald Trump kept waiting 45 minutes ahead of a scheduled summit in Helsinki with the Russian president.
According to Radio Free Europe, Angela Merkel waited for four hours and 15 minutes for a meeting with Putin in 2014, while Viktor Yanukovych, when he was president of Ukraine, waited four hours before sitting down with the Russian leader.