Mevlut Cavusoglu was speaking Thursday night after his first meeting with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov during an OSCE summit in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.
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Moscow and Ankara have seen relations hit a new low since a Turkish air force jet shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian-Turkish border last week, the most serious incident between Russia and a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member state in half a century.
“Trans-Anatolian gas pipeline – TANAP can be launched sooner than it was initially scheduled”, said Mr. Ahmet Davutoğlu, Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey, at a joint press conference with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, on December 3.
In his first comments on the meetings, Lavrov expressed his disappointment with the meeting.
“We must leave all arguments and disagreements behind and make one powerful fist, a single anti-terror front, which would work on the basis of global law under the aegis of the United Nations”, Mr Putin said in his annual state-of-the-nation address.
“Russia has repeatedly violated Turkish borders and the world community was informed about it”, said the prime minister. “We have repeated our position”, Lavrov was quoted by Russia Today. “We would not apologize for defending our borders”. Another Russian serviceman was killed in the rescue operation.
“Both sides do not want to escalate [problems] and want to fix relations, but we have different opinions and positions”.
The meeting comes after several attempts by the Turkish government to establish contact with Moscow.
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On Wednesday, Russia’s top brass accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family of personally profiting from the alleged trade. Russian Federation has been conducting airstrikes in Syria since September upon the request of the Syrian President Bashar Assad.
