Russian President Vladimir Putin took another swipe at Turkey during his State of the Nation address Thursday.
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Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the president’s statement didn’t mean that Russian military officers have been put in charge of some Syrian army units or deployed to the frontline to help coordinate the air strikes.
“Allah must have punished Turkey’s ruling clique by depriving it of sense and reason”, Putin said.
“We shall remind them many a time what they have done and they will more than once feel regret what they have done”.
If Turkey thinks it’s going to get away with “mere restrictions on the trade of tomatoes or some other restrictions … then they are grossly mistaken”, Putin said.
Turkey claims the plane breached its airspace and ignored repeated warnings but Russian Federation insists it never crossed the border from Syria and accused Ankara of a planned provocation. Russian Federation says the plane, which was taking part in the Kremlin’s air campaign against rebel groups in Syria, had not strayed from Syrian air space.
On Wednesday Russia made it personal, saying Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s family was directly profiting from ISIL oil smuggling.
Russian Federation has slapped a set of sanction measures on Turkey involving bans on agricultural products and construction companies in response to Ankara’s refusal to apologize for the incident.
“Turkey is the main consumer of the oil stolen from its rightful owners, Syria and Iraq”, he said, citing photos showing columns of tanker trucks purportedly loading oil at Daesh-controlled installations in the two violence-scarred Middle Eastern states before entering neighboring Turkey.
The Russian Defense Ministry on December 2 accused Erdogan and his family of involvement in the illegal oil trade with IS after Ankara’s downing of one of Moscow’s warplanes last week.
In the attack, a Russian pilot onboard the jet was killed.
The authenticity of the video was not immediately clear, but Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov confirmed Thursday that the victim was Chechen and called for revenge.
But the United States also wants to see more Turkish air strikes devoted to Islamic State, even as Washington firmly supports Ankara’s strikes against Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), viewed by both countries as a terrorist group.
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This article was written by Vladimir Isachenkov from The Associated Press and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
