Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denied that his country was involved in oil trade with the IS, but the Russian Defense Ministry on Wednesday released an array of satellite and aerial images showing hundreds of oil trucks streaming across the border to prove the claims.
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Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov went further, accusing Erdogan and his family of personally benefiting from Islamic State’s oil, while other Russian officials noted links between Turkey and oil refineries in Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, quickly cancelled his official visit to Turkey – a visit that had been scheduled for the day after the downing of the Russian jet.
Putin said that there was no need for Turkey to have shot down on November 24 a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 warplane, which Ankara accused of violating its airspace but Moscow maintains was over Syria.
“We will not forget this complicity with terrorists”.
“No country should ask us to apologise”, Davutoglu told reporters following a meeting with NATO’s secretary-general at alliance headquarters in Brussels.
“We have the proof in our hands”. The Turkish minister said it would be unrealistic to expect all problems with Russian Federation could be solved in one meeting but it was important to keep communications channels open.
“In the Cold War period there was a Soviet propaganda machine”.
Putin, whose administration has already announced sanctions against Ankara including a ban on the import of some Turkish foods, and reintroduced visas for Turkish visitors, insisted Turkey would be made to regret its actions.
“I think part of what’s happening is that Israel has seen for some time now Russia’s growing influence in the Middle East as the United States retreated from the region”, said the Washington Institute’s Borshchevskaya. Putin knows that to engage in a war with a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member would be madness, provoking other countries in the US-led military alliance to come to Turkey’s defence.
“For us, nothing has changed”, one of them said. The militants shot and killed the downed plane’s pilot while he was descending on a parachute and also killed a Russian marine involved in rescuing the co-pilot.
“We met with Mr. Cavusoglu…”
Just nine days ahead of the shooting-down of the plane, Erdogan had welcomed Putin to a G20 summit in the Turkish resort of Antalya like an old friend.
Turkey and Russia have always been in a proxy war in Syria: Russia, together with its quieter partner, China, supports the Shi’ite Iran-backed Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad; and Turkey explicitly supports Assad’s Sunni opponents [“moderate” jihadists] – apparently in the hope of building a Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas-type of regime in Damascus that would be friendly to its own Islamist government.
But the official announcement of the break-off in the talks dealt another blow to Russian-Turkish ties, as Putin lamented the damage to a relationship that he has spent years nurturing.
“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.
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“Allah must have punished Turkey’s ruling clique by depriving it of sense and reason”, Mr. Putin said in a major televised speech in Russia Thursday.
