UN prepares fresh Cyprus peace push, president says negotiations may advance

The United Nations is preparing what could be Antonio Guterres’s last serious attempt to move Cyprus toward a settlement, and President Nikos Christodoulides says the talks may finally be edging toward a peace plan.

Christodoulides said in an interview with Alpha TV that he had been told Guterres was encouraged by conversations he held with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in March. He added that “we might be close to developments, which may lead to a peace plan,” a notable shift after years in which the island’s diplomacy has seemed stuck in place. Any new UN push would land before Guterres leaves office later this year, giving the secretary-general a narrow window to test whether the sides still have room to negotiate.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkey invaded the island’s north after a Greek-backed coup. The split has roots in the collapse of a power-sharing government in 1960, and since then Greek Cypriots have run the internationally recognized government in the south while Turkish Cypriots administer the north. Between them sits a UN-patrolled buffer zone overseen by the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, or UNFICYP, which was established in 1964 and later given the task of monitoring the ceasefire line and maintaining the buffer zone.

The last major round of negotiations collapsed in 2017 at Crans-Montana, where the sides were seen as closer than ever to a settlement before disagreements over Turkey’s role in any future federal arrangement brought the conference down. Guterres said then that he was “deeply sorry” the talks ended without agreement. The failure still hangs over every new initiative, because it reinforced a long-running pattern: the sides can get close on process, but the decisive questions on sovereignty, security and guarantees remain unresolved.

Those same fault lines have derailed earlier efforts too. The UN-backed 2004 Annan Plan, which proposed a bicommunal, bizonal federation called the United Republic of Cyprus, was accepted by Turkish Cypriots but rejected by Greek Cypriots, who argued it did not adequately address security, viability and property rights. UN Security Council resolution 789, adopted in 1992, had already pointed to familiar confidence-building steps such as troop reductions, easier movement across the buffer zone and attention to Varosha, underscoring how long the same core issues have shaped the talks.

There are signs, however modest, that diplomacy has not gone entirely dormant. In March 2025, Guterres convened an informal meeting in Geneva with Christodoulides, Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar, and the guarantor powers Greece, Türkiye and the United Kingdom. Six trust-building initiatives were agreed, and the UN said there was a “new atmosphere” around the discussions. María Ángela Holguín Cuéllar was reappointed as Guterres’s personal envoy on Cyprus on May 2, 2025, and UNFICYP’s mandate was renewed through January 31, 2027.

That leaves the coming push as both a test of diplomacy and a measure of exhaustion. Cyprus has endured so many false starts that every fresh round is met with caution, but Guterres is now trying to determine whether the parties are finally ready to move beyond managed division.