Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar on Wednesday said he will meet the United Kingdom’s minister of state for Europe Stephen Doughty on Friday.

Tatar said he will meet Doughty at his official residence in northern Nicosia, with the meeting taking place in view of the planned enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem which will take place in the Swiss city of Geneva on March 17 and March 18.

The Cypriot government told the Cyprus Mail that it would not confirm until Thursday at the earliest whether or not President Nikos Christodoulides will also meet Doughty. The British government did not confirm or deny the reports to the Cyprus Mail.

The enlarged meeting will see both Cyprus’ sides as well as representatives of the island’s three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and the UK, and the United Nations, convene to discuss the Cyprus problem.

In advance of that meeting, Christodoulides confirmed on Thursday morning that he will on Saturday travel to Athens for a meeting with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The aim of this meeting, he said, will be to see “some data and some elements”.

“Greece will be at the enlarged meeting, so [Mitsotakis] and I considered that it is important to have this meeting, which is why I am travelling to Athens on Saturday,” he said.

He had also outlined his vision for the meeting, saying “our goal is one: the resumption of talks from where they were interrupted in Crans Montana on the basis of the agreed framework.

“We are not discussing anything else.”

Tatar, meanwhile, had told UN under-secretary-general for peacebuilding Rosemary DiCarlo that the “sovereign equality and equal international status of the Turkish Cypriot people must be accepted” for there to be constructive steps to be taken towards a solution.

“The Turkish Cypriot people are the primary element in Cyprus and have an inherent right to sovereignty, and I conveyed those vital rights at the meeting,” he said during DiCarlo’s visit to the island last month.

DiCarlo also met Christodoulides while in Cyprus, while also travelling to Athens to meet Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis and to Ankara to meet Turkish deputy foreign minister and European Union affairs director Mehmet Kemal Bozay, who was deputising for Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who was on the day in Pakistan.