The Greek Cypriot side is ready for a new enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem “as soon as possible”, Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos said on Tuesday.

“From our side, at least, we are fully committed and ready as soon as possible. It would be ideal if we could reach a form of announcement that we are now entering into substantive negotiations. So, we have to wait a bit,” he told journalists.

He added that United Nations envoy Maria Angela Holguin’s meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan is “still pending”, with that meeting set to go ahead on Thursday.

“So, let’s give it time,” he said.

To this end, he said he does not agree that the convening of a new enlarged meeting, which would bring together the island’s two sides, the UN, and its three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom, is “in doubt”.

Instead, he chose to focus on what he sees as the positives of Holguin’s recent comments and the UN’s statement after last week’s tripartite involving Holguin, President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman.

That statement declared that Christodoulides and Erhurman had agreed “that the real aim is the solution of the Cyprus problem with political equality as described by the United Nations security council resolutions”, marking the first time that two incumbent Cypriot leaders had agreed on the record on the basis for a solution to the Cyprus problem since 2019.

“So, it is possible wherever someone chooses to put emphasis, whether they want to put emphasis on the negative or the positive,” he said.

The “negative” in this sense appears to be Erhurman’s ostensible reluctance to hold an enlarged meeting at the soonest possible moment, believing that progress should be made in advance of an enlarged meeting, and not only through it.

Erhurman called a press conference after last week’s tripartite meeting and stressed that the next enlarged meeting “must be an innovative and meaningful process”.

To this end, he said that while the tripartite saw “small advances”, the achievements were “not sufficient to create an environment conducive to comprehensive negotiations”.

“It is not appropriate to proceed with an enlarged meeting without more comprehensive solutions, including crossing points,” he said, before adding that “steps have been taken and some progress has been made … but this is not yet sufficient for a comprehensive solution process”.

Christodoulides, meanwhile, had told Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis that an enlarged meeting should be held “as soon as possible”, and said after the tripartite that he would be ready as early as “next week” to participate in one.