Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkiye expects US President Donald Trump to fulfill his promise regarding the delivery of F-35 fighter jets.

Axar.az reports that Erdogan made the remarks during an exclusive interview for Al Jazeera’s Al Muqabala.

Turkiye was removed from the multinational F-35 programme in 2019 after taking delivery of the Russian-made S-400 air defence system, which Washington argued could compromise the stealth jet’s technology. Standing beside Erdogan during the NATO summit in Ankara last month, Trump said his administration would lift the CAATSA sanctions imposed on Turkiye in December 2020 over the S-400 purchase, and said a return to the F-35 programme was “something certainly we’d consider”.

Any sale, however, still faces resistance in Congress and a 2020 law bars the Pentagon from transferring F-35s to Turkiye for as long as it retains the S-400 system.