At the meeting, the Foreign Ministers welcomed the close cooperation between the European Union and Turkey to deal with the refugee crisis. Linkevičius stressed the need to fully implement the exhisting agreements and expressed Lithuania's support for Turkey, which hosted approximately 3 million refugees from Syria and other countries in the region.
Çavuşoğlu informed Lithuania's Foreign Minister that while cooperating with the EU and NATO, Turkey had managed to significantly reduce the number of migrants crossing into Europe and to hit people-smugglers.
Linkevičius stressed the importance of unity in the face of challenges both when addressing the refugee crisis and in the field of security, since we could overcome the difficulties only through joint efforts.
The Foreign Ministers discussed the Kremlin's aggressive actions that jeopardized European security, the danger of Russian state media's use of propaganda and the deteriorating situation of the Crimean Tatars. The Foreign Ministers noted that the international community must maintain its focus on systematic human rights violations in Crimea. The Lithuanian and Turkish Foreign Ministers underlined that their countries would never recognize Russia's unlawful annexation of Crimea.
In the meeting, the Foreign Ministers dedicated a lot of attention to Ukraine, the implementation of the Minsk accords, and the importance of media freedom.
The Turkish Foreign Minister thanked Lithuania for its leadership in the international arena, when raising issues related to both the Crimean Tatars and Ukraine.
From 31 March to 1 April, Lithuania's Foreign Minister is attending the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, as part of the delegation led by the President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaitė.
