Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that he found it suspicious that Turkey had reached out to its NATO allies after the downing of a Russian jet over the Syrian border but not to Moscow.
“Instead of immediately getting in contact with us, as far as we know, the Turkish side immediately turned to their partners from NATO to discuss this incident, as if we shot down their plane and not they ours,” Mr. Putin said in Sochi. “Do they want to make NATO serve ISIS?” he asked.
The Russian leader, nevertheless, insisted the affair should encourage more cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
A U.S. official said U.S. forces were not involved in the downing of the Russian jet, which was the first time a Russian or Soviet military aircraft has been publicly acknowledged to have been shot down by a NATO member since the 1950s.
The incident occurred as Russia and the West were slowly edging toward some manner of understanding to unite forces to confront the Islamic State in the wake of the bloody terrorist attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian charter flight over Egypt that together killed 354 people.
President François Hollande of France began a world tour this week to try to build consensus on the issue. He’s in Washington on Tuesday, and will go to Moscow in the coming days.
But the Sukhoi incident was likely to further sour relations between two key parties to any solution, Moscow and Ankara, already bruised over previous tensions on the border and differences over the fate of President Bashar Assad of Syria. The Kremlin dispatched its military to Syria in late September to shore up Mr. Assad and to fight rebels backed by Turkey.
“It would be wrong now to give any assessments, assumptions or make any conclusions before we get a full picture,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told reporters in Sochi in response to a question about how the incident would affect relations between the two countries.
“We have to be patient. It is a very serious incident, but again, without all of the information it is impossible to say anything and it would be wrong.”
However, President Putin, speaking in Sochi before a meeting with King Abdulla II of Jordan, said the incident would have “serious consequences” for ties between Russia and Turkey.
Russia’s entry into the heavily trafficked skies around Syria raised immediate concerns about mishaps, inadvertent or otherwise, that could lead to confrontations involving Turkey, a NATO member, and the U.S. Turkey has warned Moscow about intrusions in its airspace at least two times since it began its bombing campaign in September and last week shot down an unmanned aerial device that analysts said was likely of Russian origin.
Some Western analysts characterised the downing of the jet as a robust response by Turkey which they said created clear red lines for Russia and should thereby make further clashes less, rather than more likely.
Tensions had been building recently over Russian bombing in the border area.
Last week, Turkey summoned the Russian ambassador, Andrey G. Karlov, to discuss Ankara’s concerns over the bombing of Turkmen villages in northern Syria and called for an immediate end to the Russian military operation close to the Turkish border, according to Turkish Foreign Ministry.
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