Nations’ uneasy ties
Monday’s assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey came just as relations between the two countries were warming up following a cold war over the Turkish downing of a Russian fighter jet.
Russia was accused of violating Turkish airspace in October 2015 — during the start of Moscow’s intervention in the Syrian civil war — leading Turkey to warn that it would open fire the next time.
It made good on the threat some two months later, when Turkish F-16 fighters shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 warplane near the border of Turkey’s Hatay region on Nov. 24, 2015.
The Russian plane’s two airmen bailed out, with Syrian rebels fatally shooting the pilot as he parachuted to the ground. The navigator was rescued by Russian special forces and denied straying into Turkish airspace “even for one second.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned that incident as a “stab in the back delivered by the accomplices of terrorists,” and Moscow quickly announced it was moving a naval cruiser loaded with high-tech missiles closer to Syria’s Latakia province to protect its aircraft.
Days later, Putin ratcheted up tensions by accusing Turkey of letting ISIS operate a “living oil pipe” across the Syrian border, and the head of Russia’s state-owned news agency blasted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on TV as “an unrestrained and deceitful man hooked on cheap oil from the barbaric caliphate.’’
Russia then announced it was ending a long delay in shipping an S-300 ground-to-air missile system to Iran — one of Turkey’s main regional rivals — and imposed a slew of economic sanctions and travel restrictions.
Turkey accused Russia of again violating its airspace in January 2016, but after Moscow moved to ally itself with Syria’s Kurds — who seek to carve out a country that would cross into Turkey — Erdogan backed down and in June apologized over the downing of the Russian jet.
A month later, Putin was the first foreign leader to offer support to Erdogan following a failed coup by the Turkish military, and Erdogan traveled to St. Petersburg to meet with Putin the following month.
The two leaders then sat next to each other and enjoyed a few laughs at an October meeting of the World Energy Congress in Istanbul, with Anna Glazova, a foreign-relations expert at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, later noting that Putin could easily have sent an underling.
Analysts told Agence France-Presse that Monday’s murder of Russian envoy Andrei Karlov was unlikely to reverse the thaw.
James Nixey of the British think tank Chatham House predicted Russia would “paint it as part of a wider war on terror” and use it to leverage support for its Syrian policy from President-elect Donald Trump.