Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he had heard “nothing new” from his Turkish counterpart on Thursday after the first high-level bilateral contact between the two countries since the Turkish airforce shot down a Russian jet nine days ago.
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“In the long-term, Turkey needs to cut its dependence on Russian gas below 30 percent, from 55 percent now, and it also needs to speed up work on getting Kurdish gas”, Mehmet Ogutcu, chairman of London-based energy advisory firm Global Resources Partnership, said by phone on Wednesday. “We heard nothing new”, Lavrov told a televised news conference.
Turkey-Russia relations deteriorated after the Turkish Air Force shot down the Russian Su-24 warplane November 24.
“We know for example who in Turkey fills their pockets and allows terrorists to make money from the stolen oil in Syria”, Putin said.
Turkey is the second-largest consumer of Russian natural gas.
“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 told the Russian parliament, the Federal Assembly.
On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry showed what it called a proof that the Turkish government was involved in “criminal activities” of oil trade with the Islamic State group. The ministry insisted the images definitively prove Turkey’s massive oil trade with the IS. “Our hope is that they will give up their baseless claims”.
“Let me say it. George Haswani, holder of a Russian passport and a Syrian national, is one of the biggest merchants in this business”, Erdogan said.
The Turkish strongman accused Moscow of “slander” and has rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands to apologise over the plane incident, saying that Turkey was acting well within its rights to protect its border. He added that Turkey had once again expressed its sadness over the jet incident and wished condolences for the killed pilot.
“Let’s decrease tensions with our rhetoric”, Davutoglu said.
Moscow imposed economic measures against Ankara after the attack, citing the growing terrorist threat originating in Turkey.
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Putin said the military action has proven the capability of Russia’s modernized military.
