Russia stepped up its rhetoric against Turkey last week after Turkey downed a Russian military jet that it said had illegally entered Turkish airspace.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has challenged Putin and said he will step down if Russian claims that Turkey buys oil from Daesh are proved.
Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the members of Federal Assembly and State Duma on Thursday in his annual speech to lawmakers on the state of the nation. “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.
But they are rival players in the war in Syria, with Ankara part of a US-led coalition against IS that is opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Moscow has launched a bombing campaign at the request of the Damascus regime.
Visiting Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu Friday urged Russia to de-escalate tensions between Turkey and Russia arising from the recent downing of a Russian warplane by the Turkish air force.
Erdogan has furiously denied the accusations against him and his family and said Turkey had proof that Russian Federation was, in fact, involved in trading oil with IS.
“We know who in Turkey are filling their pockets and allow terrorists to earn money by selling oil stolen from Syria”, he said.
“We will remind them not once about what they have done, and they will feel sorry about it a couple of times”, Putin continued. The ministry insisted that the images definitively prove Turkey’s massive oil trade with the IS. “We will reveal it to the world”, said Mr Erdogan, according to the Daily Mail.
A Russian Defense Ministry official said Wednesday that there were three main routes for transporting Islamic State oil into Turkey and displayed stills and video footage of what he said were trucks shipping IS oil on these routes.
Erdogan slammed the claims as “slander” and in turn accused Russian Federation of involvement with the IS oil trade, alleging that Turkey had evidence of that. “Every day it produces a variety of lies”, Davutoglu said.
Turkey dismissed the charges as “Soviet propaganda” on Thursday.
Officials on Friday confirmed that some small amount of oil may cross the Syria-Turkish border in tanker trucks, but not in quantities that would interest government officials. “We have to be prepared and we have to defeat them [terrorists] before they get here that’s why we launched this operation in Syria”, Putin said.
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A war plane crashes in flames in a mountainous area in northern Syria after it was shot down by Turkish fighter jets near the Turkish-Syrian border on Nov 24, 2015.
