Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses local administrators at his palace in Ankara, Turkey, Nov. 26, 2015. The hapless “Erdogan” was made of straw, and identifiable by a print-out photograph attached to its head.
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Tuesday, Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter jet near its border with Syria.
Earlier, US President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande urged Russia and Turkey to avoid escalation over Turkey’s downing of a Russian plane along the Turkish-Syrian border. “There is now one point which everyone agrees and that is the objective of destroying Daesh”, Fabius said referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
But he added: “We wish it hadn’t happened, but it happened”.
Meanwhile, Turkey said it will not apologize for the incident, but has called for the two countries to keep all diplomatic and communication channels open. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said in televised remarks that Russia has not received any apology from Turkish leaders over the incident, or any proposals to compensate Moscow.
The pilot of the downed Russian plane, along with a special forces soldier sent to rescue him, were killed by Syrian rebels on the ground.
He said both nations – whose relations have until now remained frosty – shared a common enemy and urged Russian Federation to join an worldwide coalition fighting the extremists. Speaking during a visit to Azerbaijan, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Friday that Turkey wants to overcome tensions with Moscow through “diplomacy”.
“These threats are very much real and we declare this with responsibility”, he said at a press conference after talks with his Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem, in Moscow.
The Russian leader said, under the cooperation already established with the US-led coalition, Russia’s military had passed on details of the flight plan of the jet that was shot down this week. Russia is Turkey’s second-largest trading partner, while more than three million Russian tourists visited Turkey past year.
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“According to the decision of the supreme commander-in-chief, an air defence complex S-400 has been delivered to the Russian Hmeimim airbase in Syria and is already on duty to cover the area”, the defence ministry said in a statement.
