‘No prospect of improving ties’

Military tasks

MOSCOW, Dec 17, (RTRS): Russian President

said on Thursday he “sees no prospect” of improving relations with the current leadership of Turkey after it downed a Russian jet bomber last month.

“It is hard for us to reach agreement with the current Turkish leadership, if at all possible,” Putin said during his annual news conference. Putin said the downing of the Russian warplane was “an act of enmity” and he did not understand why Turkey did it.

“What have they achieved? Maybe, they thought that we would run away from there (Syria)? But Russia is not such a country.”

Putin said on Thursday that Russia was ready to restore relations with ex-Soviet Georgia which chilled after their five-day war in August 2008.

Russia is also ready to cancel visa requirements for Georgian nationals, Putin told his annual news conference.

Putin

Appointment

Referring to his political foe Mikheil Saakashvili, who led Georgia during the war, Putin said the appointment of the latter as a regional governor in Ukraine was “a spit in the face of the Ukrainian people”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia did have personnel in eastern Ukraine who were carrying out certain military tasks but denied Moscow had deployed regular troops there.

“We never said there were no people there who were carrying out certain tasks including in the military sphere,” Putin told an annual news conference.

“But that does not mean there are Russian (regular) troops there, feel the difference.”

Putin said Russia was ready to persuade separatists in eastern Ukraine that a compromise was needed in order to achieve a political settlement of the conflict there.

He also said he expected trade relations with Ukraine to worsen, but that Moscow would not impose any sanctions on Kiev related to its trade deal with the European Union.

Committed

Putin said it was not yet clear whether the children of Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika had actually committed any crimes, an allegation recently made by the opposition.

A fund run by opposition activist Alexei Navalny has said that Chaika and his family had been involved in crimes, including corruption schemes.

Meanwhile, Russia’s FSB secret service on Wednesday said it had prevented a number of women from boarding flights to Turkey where they planned to meet up with suspected “terrorists” they had fallen in love with online.

On several occasions, agents from the Federal Security Service approached women, aged 18 to 30, at St Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport to tell them the men they had met on social media were in fact “suspected members of terrorist organisations”, the FSB’s branch in Russia’s second city said in a statement.

Each time, the women then decided of their own volition not to board their flights to Istanbul, it added, without specifying how many women were involved.

They were “in love with these men” who had paid for their tickets and who “had not given any indication they belonged to terrorist groups,” the statement said.

The FSB operations took place from September to December.

In June, a 19-year-old Russian student was detained by Turkish authorities when she tried to enter Syria. She was placed in pre-trial detention in Russia in October.

According to FSB figures released on Tuesday, nearly 2,900 Russians are fighting or have fought with the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

At the request of the Damascus regime, Russia began carrying out air strikes in Syria in late September.