LONDON/MOSCOW, Dec 3 (Reuters) – Britain joined air strikes on Syria on Thursday in a show of European solidarity against Islamic State, but Vladimir Putin issued bitter new denunciations of Turkey for shooting down a Russian plane, demonstrating the world’s lack of unity. Without naming the United States, he accused Washington for turning Iraq, Syria and Libya into a “zone of chaos and anarchy threatening the entire world” by supporting change of regimes in those countries.
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Russia has implemented a series of economic sanctions against Turkey, including banning fruit and vegetable imports and ordering Russian tour operators not to send tourists to the country. “That means no shelter to bandits, no double standards, no contacts whatsoever with any terrorist organizations, no attempts to use them for some selfish goals, no criminal, bloody business with terrorists”.
“We know who in Turkey makes money and allows terrorists to make profit”, Putin said in his state-of-the-nation speech.
Turkey would have cause to regret its actions “more than once”, he said, promising Russia’s retaliatory actions would be neither hysterical nor unsafe. “And it seems Allah made a decision to punish the ruling clique in Turkey by relieving them of their sense and judgment”.
The incident was the first time in half a century that a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member shot down a Russian plane. “Let those in Turkey know it who shot our pilots in the back, who hypocritically tries to justify themselves and their actions and cover up the crimes of terrorists”, he said.
“But if someone thinks that after committing heinous war crimes, the murder of our people, it will end with tomatoes and limitations in construction and other fields, then they are deeply mistaken”, Putin said”.
Two Syrian monitoring groups are reporting that the U.S.-led coalition has targeted oil facilities run by the Islamic State group in eastern Syria.
The Russian and Turkish foreign ministers met in Belgrade on the sidelines of the OSCE meeting – the first senior-level meeting since the incident – but the exchange was frosty. “I do not understand why they did it. Any problem – even that which we might have missed – could have been dealt with in a different way”, Putin added.
On Wednesday, the Associated Press (AP) reported that Russian Deputy Minister of Defence Anatoly Antonov invited dozens of foreign military attaches and hundreds of journalists to present them satellite and aerial images of thousands of oil trucks streaming from the Daesh-controlled deposits in Syria and Iraq into Turkish sea ports and refineries.
He accused Turkey of helping IS by buying oil from the group, and said that “terrorists” used Turkish territory to prepare terror attacks against other countries, which he didn’t name.
In a move raising the potential threat of a Russia-NATO conflict, Russia said it will deploy long-range air defense missiles to its base in Syria and destroy any target that may threaten its warplanes following the downing of a Russian military jet by Turkey.
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“They were called Pravda lies”, he said, referring to the daily newspaper that was the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. Despite economic sanctions and strong rhetoric over Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and proxy war in Ukraine, the transatlantic community seemed to calculate that the costs of confrontation far exceeded the benefits. The Russian pilot was killed by militants after bailing out from the plane and a Russian marine was also killed on a rescue mission to retrieve a second pilot.
