Vladimir Putin warned Turkish leaders in his annual state-of-the-nation address before Russia’s Federal Assembly yesterday, promising Ankara would regret having downed a Russian warplane near the Syrian border.
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President Vladimir Putin hit out at the Turkish leadership saying, that “Allah” was punishing their leaders by stripping off their “sanity” and depriving them of “intelligence”.
Russian Federation buys about $1 billion worth of Turkish food and other products annually and is Turkey’s No. 1 energy provider, shipping gas, coal and oil.
Russian Federation denies its plane ever entered into Turkey’s airspace.
Turkey’s president has now claimed that he has proof that Russian Federation is involved in illegally buying oil from Isis militants in Syria. The son Antonov referred to evidently is Necmettin Bilal Erdogan, one of three owners of BMZ Group, a marine shipping concern that has been linked in at least one news report with transporting IS’s stolen oil.
“The amount of oil being smuggled is extremely low and has decreased over time”, claimed USA special envoy Amos Hochstein, a stunning admission which suggests the United States was well aware of oil smuggling into Turkey even before the Russian evidence.
“We all have a common enemy and that is ISIL and I want to make sure we focus on that threat, ” Obama said adding that any problem should be solved through the “diplomatic language”. According to the ministry, Islamic State oil is transported to Turkey with “hundreds of oil trucks and heavy vehicles moving both to and from the Turkish border”, as ministry spokesman Lieutenant-General Sergey Rudskoy said during the presentation.
The State Department has dismissed Moscow’s charge against its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally, which directly implicated President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family in the trade, insisting there is no evidence to support it.
“When they asked us why we shipped, we replied that Russian Federation was our strategic partner”, Erdogan said.
On the sidelines of a global climate change conference near Paris on Monday, Putin said the downing of the plane was a “huge mistake”.
An undated still image taken from a video made available by the Russian Defence Ministry in Moscow, Russia December 2, 2015, shows the Turkish-Syrian border crossing.
“We won’t be rattling sabers”, he said. Let those in Turkey know it who shot our pilots in the back, who hypocritically tries to justify themselves and their actions and cover up the crimes of terrorists, he said.
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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.
