The Vienna talks on Syria crisis settlement should be held with the participation of all Syrian opposition groups, as well as a Damascus delegation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday.
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Turkey’s Foreign Minister’s expressed Ankara’s condolences to Russia for the death of a Russian pilot when one of its warplanes was shot down by Turkey on the Syrian border last week.
Turkey says the Russian jet violated its airspace and that it was repeatedly warned, something Russia has denied.
Russian President Vladimir Putin described the move as a war crime on Thursday and said the Kremlin would punish Ankara with additional sanctions. The shoot-down, the first time a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation country downed a Russian plane in more than half a century, has triggered a bitter spat between the two nations, which had developed robust economic ties in the past. “Turkey hasn’t lost its moral principles as to purchase petroleum from a terror organization”, Erdogan said in Wednesday’s address at Qatar University, utilizing the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group, soon following the Russian Defense Ministry made the claims. Asked if there was any possibility that the plane was actually shot down inside Syria, Stoltenberg said: “The allied assessments that we have are consistent with the information we have from Turkey”, he stated at a news conference. Russian Federation insists that the plane did not cross from Syria and accused Turkey of a deliberate provocation.
“We will not refuse this proposal”, Lavrov said at a press conference after talks in Nicosia with his Cypriot counterpart.
No one believes in the anti-Turkish propaganda but Russian authorities, said the prime minister.
“The Ministry of Agriculture does not plan to expand the list of embargoed food products” the representative said as quoted by Russia’s TASS news agency. Russian Federation has imposed sanctions against Turkish products in retaliation for the downing.
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Russia’s foreign minister has said that he would agree to meet with his Turkish counterpart this week to hear Turkey’s explanations on the downing of a Russian air force jet.
