Lucian Kim has written an interesting piece for Slate on why Turkey's shooting down of a Russian jet seems to have caught Russian President Vladimir Putin by surprise. Here's an excerpt:
The reason for Putin’s surprise is that Russia has come to see Erdogan as a valued partner. Turkey is the second-largest market for Siberian natural gas after Germany and was slated to be rewarded with a new pipeline, Turkish Stream, after relations soured with the European Union over Ukraine. Russia has also supplied Turkey with more than 10 percent of its tourists.
Putin acknowledged Turkey’s “regional interests,” a nod to Erdogan’s underground war against ethnic Kurds and even some illegal oil purchases from ISIS on the side. In his rage, the Russian president estimated ISIS oil sales via Turkey in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions.
“We always considered Turkey not just as a close neighbor but a friendly state,” Putin said. But instead of getting in touch with the Kremlin after shooting down the Su-24, Erdogan ran to his Western allies. “Turkey turned to its NATO partners to discuss this incident—as if we had shot down their plane and not the other way around,” Putin fumed. “What do they want: to put NATO at the service of ISIS?”
The Kremlin propaganda machine picked up the new narrative without a hiccup. On Tuesday Russians learned for the first time that their favorite foreign tourist destination actually aids and abets terrorists. A red banner on the studio monitor read “stab in the back” on the Channel One evening news. Two weekends ago, Erdogan welcomed Putin at the G20 summit in Antalya with a smile, the state-run broadcaster recalled.
The main reason for Erdogan’s deceit was, for once, not blamed on the Americans. Turkey’s motive for shooting down the Russian warplane, Channel One explained, was to scuttle French President François Hollande’s effort to build a broad international coalition to fight ISIS including Britain, the United States, and Russia. Hollande plans to visit Putin on Thursday, following meetings with British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama.
“The Turks are saving ISIS,” one expert told Channel One. Another talking head posited that Turkey was getting revenge for the Russian air force’s bombing of 15 ISIS oil facilities and 525 tanker trucks. Viewers were reminded that Turkey had supported Chechen rebels in their unsuccessful war of independence from Moscow two decades ago.
Bashing Turkey is an old tradition in Russia. Long before the United States was even founded, Russian czars dreamed of liberating Istanbul—formerly the Eastern Orthodox capital of Constantinople—and taking control of the Turkish Straits, which connect the Black Sea to the world’s oceans. The Crimean peninsula was only one of many territories that Russian armies conquered from the shrinking Ottoman Empire.
Read the entire article here
Here's an update on the surviving pilot from the plane shot down by Turkey, courtesy of RFE/RL's news desk:
The surviving pilot of a Russian warplane shot down by Turkey on the Turkish-Syrian border says he had received no warning.
In his first interview since the incident on November 24, Konstantin Murakhtin told Russian state media on November 25 that there had been "not contact at all" before his warplane was shot down by Turkish fighter jets.
Turkey insists it gave 10 warnings in the space of five minutes before the plane was shot down.
"There was no warning, not by radio exchange nor visually," said Murakhtin, who was rescued by Russian special forces.
His co-pilot was killed by gunfire as he parachuted from the burning plane.
Murakhtin, speaking from the Hmeymim airbase in Syria, said he knew the region he had been flying in "very well" and that the warplane had not been in Turkish airspace "even for a second."
(AFP, BBC)
No major news agencies have picked this up yet, but it could be big news if confirmed:
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