Last week Mr Erdogan denied Turkey procures oil from anything other than legitimate sources.
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At a briefing, Russian Federation claimed Turkey’s President and his family were involved in buying oil from ISIS.
On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow had received information suggesting that oil from IS territories was being brought into Turkey by truck convoys, in amounts that hinted at industrial use, RIA Novosti reported. “And evidently Allah made a decision to punish the ruling clique in Turkey by depriving them of their intelligence and reason”, he said.
Turkey would have cause to regret its actions “more than once”, he said, promising Russia’s retaliatory actions would be neither hysterical nor unsafe.
President Vladimir Putin called on the worldwide community to form a joint front under the United Nations to defeat terrorism, as he lashed out at Turkey over the downing of a Russian warplane.
“We are saddened by the disproportional responses by Russian Federation to an incident in which the whole world agrees we are right”.
Lavrov told reporters after talks with his Cypriot counterpart in Nicosia he will meet with Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu “to hear what he has to say”, adding he spoke to Çavuşoğlu by phone the day after Turkey shot down a Russian aircraft but only heard “some excuses”.
“The main customer for this oil stolen from Syria and Iraq is Turkey”, said Antonov and added, “the top political leadership of the country, President Erdogan and his family, is involved in this criminal business”.
Despite the evidence presented by Russia, Erdogan is unlikely to keep his promise to resign if his links with Islamic State and illegal oil trade are proven, Antonov said. The Russian Defense Ministry on Wednesday released an array of satellite and aerial images which it said show hundreds of oil trucks streaming across the border.
Lieutenant-General Sergey Rudskoy said that Russian air raids against oil storage facilities and the smugglers’ fleet of over 1,000 tanker lorries had halved the militants’ huge income.
Antonov and other Russian officials claimed that ISIS militants make $2 billion per year from the illegal oil trade, and said Russia’s airstrikes have cut the terror group’s profits in half.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Thursday accused Moscow of running a “Soviet propaganda machine”.
“During the Cold War era there was a Soviet propaganda machine”.
“They were called Pravda lies”, he said, referring to the daily newspaper that was the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. “Some characteristics of the Soviet era are emerging one by one. Nobody attaches any value to the lies of this Soviet-style propaganda machine”.
The meeting would be the first between senior officials from the two countries since Turkey downed the Russian warplane, touching off a crisis between the two countries that previously enjoyed warm ties.
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