Turkey will boycott meetings with the US ambassador to Ankara as it no longer recognises the envoy as the US representative in the country, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday, stepping up a diplomatic row.

"We have not agreed and are not agreeing to this ambassador making farewell visits with ministers, the parliament speaker and myself," Erdogan said of US ambassador John Bass, who is shortly to leave Turkey after being nominated the US envoy to Afghanistan. 

"We do not see him (Bass) as the representative of the United States in Turkey," he said at a news conference with President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade.

source: AFP