President Nikos Christodoulides on Friday said that he expects for the date of an enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem, to be announced “soon”, with the meeting set to involve the island’s two sides, its three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, and the United Nations.

He said during a visit to a school that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ “effort is being strengthened even more”, and that as such “we expect soon to have a positive outcome, which, for us, can be nothing other than the convening of an enlarged meeting at which the resumption of talks will be announced”.

On this matter, he said he had spoken to UN envoy Maria Angela Holguin on Thursday, before saying that when he had met Guterres in Brussels in March, “what [he] conveyed to me … was that this effort began immediately, and is being strengthened even more with meetings with all the parties involved”.

He added that these meetings “are not just us in Cyprus” and that “it is not just us or the Turkish Cypriots” with whom Guterres is conversing.

“You know very well where the key to the solution is and we will exchange views on this effort as well,” he said.

On the matter of confidence-building measures to be forged between the island’s two sides, he said there are “some positive developments” to report ahead of his planned meeting with Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman on Friday evening.

Asked whether he will discuss recent reports of tension in the buffer zone with Erhurman, he said “of course I will”.

“It is not just the provocations in the buffer zone, there are also some other challenges, some other negative developments which may be created by some who want to create a negative climate which inevitably affects both the essence of the Cyprus problem and the effort being made to restart the talks,” he said.

The convening of an enlarged meeting will require the consent of the Turkish Cypriot side, with Erhurman previously having expressed reservations regarding the prospect of such a meeting being held before substantial progress is achieved in devising and executing confidence-building measures between the two sides in Cyprus.

He has said before that Christodoulides’ insistence on the matter constitutes an effort to circumvent the Turkish Cypriots.

“I want to emphasise this. What they actually understand by an enlarged meeting is this, I am sorry, but the Greek Cypriot leadership has always tried to address the Republic of Turkey, not the Turkish Cypriot side. This is being repeated,” he said at last month’s Antalya diplomacy forum.

Instead, he said, he would rather discuss matters directly with the Greek Cypriot side.

“What I said was, ‘let us meet face-to-face in Nicosia, and let us both make decisions on confidence-building measures which will make life easier for both the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot people,” he said.