NICOSIA – Amid worries that there’s no hope of reunifying Cyprus more than 48 years after Turkish invasions seized and occupied the northern third of the island, the leaders of the two sides will talk.

Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, whose government is a member of the European Union that Turkey has fruitlessly been trying to join since 2005, is expected to meet Turkish-Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar for the first time since April.

That will be during an event organized by the United Nations to mark the end of 2022, said the Cyprus News Agency CNA but it wasn’t said what they would discuss as Tatar said he wants acceptance of the isolated side and not reunification.

Earlier in the year they talked at an event organized by the UN’s peacekeeping force UNFICYP at the abandoned Nicosia airport about a plan to include women in the process for solving the dilemma of a divided island.

Greek-Cypriot negotiater Menelaos Menelaou and Turkish Cypriot special representative Ergün Olgun held their first meeting Nov. 24 since a visit by the UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, Miroslav Jenča, said The Cyprus Mail.

During the meeting, the two said that Jenča’s visit was a positive development, indicating the continued interest of the UN for the Cyprus problem although no one has come close to finding an answer over the decades.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was at the last round of reunification talks in July, 2017 at the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana which collapsed when Tatar and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said they would never remove a 35,000-strong army in the occupied territory and wanted the right of further invasion.

Anastasiades walked away from that and said Tatar’s demand for two separate states was a non-starter that seemingly sealed the end of solving the problem and that he wouldn’t talk with him before saying he would try again.