The Turkish strongman visited Qatar this week and agreed a liquified natural gas deal, while his Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu travelled to energy-rich Azerbaijan. “But if someone thinks that after committing heinous war crimes, the murder of our people, it will end with (an embargo on) tomatoes and limitations in construction and other fields then they are deeply mistaken”, Putin said. Russian Federation seemed to take that denial in stride, but after USA special envoy and coordinator for global energy affairs, Amos Hochstein, said on Friday that the amount of oil smuggled into Turkey from Syria is “of no significance from a volume perspective”, Moscow appears to have had enough.
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“We would like to see Russian Federation be more constructive in trying to confront this problem”.
Turkey says the plane strayed into its airspace and ignored repeated warnings, while furious Moscow insists it did not cross from Syria and has accused Ankara of a planned provocation.
“Turkey is the main customer of this oil that is stolen from Syria and Iraq”, said deputy defense minister Anatoly Antonov at a defense briefing reported in Russian newspaper Pravda.
And on Wednesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense presented the most potentially damning charge against Ankara – that Turkey, under the lead of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family, was participating in and facilitating the ISIS oil trade.
In Belgrade, no change emerged from the 40-minute meeting between the Russian and Turkish foreign ministers, the first high-level talks in person between the two countries since the downing of the warplane.
Since Turkey shot down a Russian jet last month, relations between the two countries has been in a state of near free fall.
Russian Federation has retaliated by deploying long-range air defence missile systems to its base in Syria, 30 miles south of the border with Turkey.
The top USA priority is for Turkey to secure its southern border with Syria, the first official said.
Russia’s defence ministry on Saturday accused the United States of turning a blind eye to the trafficking of oil into Turkey from Syrian areas under Islamic State control, after Washington called the amounts involved insignificant. “Moreover, there were no insignia on it”, Davutoglu said.
Another NATO ambassador in Ankara said: “On the good side … this will cement Turkey’s ties with the [NATO] alliance”.
“Allah only knows why they did it”, Putin told a vast assembly of the Russian political elite gathered in the hall of St. George, a majestic white marble room in the Kremlin.
The Twitter trolling is the perhaps most innocuous part of the ongoing spat between Turkey and Russian Federation.
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Moscow has said that its warplanes have been targeting terrorist groups near Syria’s border with Turkey, while Ankara has said the Russian raids have been aimed at moderate militant groups made of ethnic Turks who oppose Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.
