Russian President Vladimir V. Putin earlier today in Moscow increased his rhetoric against Turkish leadership over the recent downing of a Russian warplane in Syria even as he called for a unified coalition with the West to fight terrorism in the Middle East.
“Only Allah knows why they did it,” Putin said about the downing in an hour-long address to Russian lawmakers and other public figures, Russia’s own state of the union address. “And I guess Allah decided to punish the ruling clique in Turkey by stripping it of its sanity.”
Putin has sought a central role in brokering a Syrian political settlement with hopes to increase Russian influence abroad and escape isolation. But when Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber over the Syrian border last week, the incident exposed the explosive potential of the differences among the foreign countries intervening in the five-year-old Syrian civil war.
Russia responded to the downing with sweeping economic sanctions targeting $30 billion in trade between Russia and Turkey. The two countries had enjoyed a reasonably close bilateral relationship, despite Turkey’s membership in the NATO alliance, in the years preceding the incident.
“We are not planning to and will not engage in saber-rattling,” Putin said. “But if someone thinks that he can commit a foul war crime, the murder of our people, and just get away with some tomatoes or limits in construction and other spheres, then he is deeply mistaken.”
Putin also defended his decision to deploy troops and warplanes to Syria in late September, recalling the terrorist attacks committed in Russia since the mid-1990s and adding that Russia must fight terrorism abroad to prevent it from striking at home.
He also took aim at the United States and the West for the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, saying it he said destabilized a region “that looked quite good until recently but are now areas of anarchy.”
“We know who it was decided to change regimes in those countries and impose their own rules,” Putin said. “They destroyed those states and then they washed their hands of it, opening the road to radicals, extremists, and terrorists.”
