Russia and Turkey Hurl Insults as Feud Deepens

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
DEC. 3, 2015

The New York Times

MOSCOW — The leaders of Turkey and Russia flung insults at each other on Thursday in their deepening feud over the shooting down of a Russian warplane, with President Vladimir V. Putin warning that Moscow would do more than merely ban tomatoes and construction projects to penalize Ankara.

The Kremlin also said that the long-delayed transfer of the S-300 air defense system to Iran had started, a move that strengthens one of Turkey’s regional rivals while raising concerns in Israel.

The foreign ministers of Russia and Turkey met on Thursday in Belgrade, Serbia, on the sidelines of a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Given the general mood in the ministers’ home countries, however, the tension persisted.

In Moscow, Mr. Putin, delivering his annual speech on the state of the federation, opened by repeating his call for an international coalition to fight terrorism and then suggested that the Turkish leadership was deranged. For his part, the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, accused the Kremlin on Thursday of practicing a crude, “Soviet-style propaganda.”

Mr. Putin said that there was no need for Turkey to have shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 warplane on Nov. 24, which Ankara accused of violating its airspace but Moscow maintains was over Syria.

“Allah only knows why they did it,” Mr. Putin told a vast assembly of the Russian political elite gathered in the hall of St. George, a majestic white marble room in the Kremlin. The audience included the widows of the pilot and of another serviceman killed in the episode. “Probably, Allah decided to punish Turkey’s ruling clique by depriving it of sense and reason,” Mr. Putin said.

The Russian president said that his country’s response to the attack would be measured and would avoid military threats, but that it would extend beyond the clamping down on tourism, the limited economic sanctions on agricultural products and the canceling of labor contracts already announced.

“If they expected a nervous or hysterical reaction from us, if they wanted to see us become a danger to ourselves as much as to the world, they won’t get it,” Mr. Putin said. “We are not going to rattle the saber.”

Mr. Putin did, however, threaten further, unspecified actions beyond the scattered measures already announced.

“If someone thinks they can commit war crimes, kill our people and get away with it, suffering nothing but a ban on tomato imports, as well as a few restrictions in construction or other industries, they’re delusional,” he said.

Alexander Novak, the energy minister, announced soon after the speech that Moscow was halting talks with Ankara over the Turkish Stream gas pipeline, a $10 billion construction project meant to funnel Russian gas to Europe.

Mr. Putin repeated the accusation, laid out the day before in a lengthy briefing by the Russian Ministry of Defense, that the governing Turkish elite, including the family of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was earning a fortune from oil exported by the Islamic State from Syria and Iraq.

The ministry offered an exceedingly rare invitation to foreign journalists to enter its headquarters to view a series of satellite photographs showing lines of hundreds of trucks close to oil facilities and also lining up near the Turkish border.

Those allegations were dismissed by Mr. Davutoglu, who said that Turkey was working to seal its border with Syria.

“In the Cold War period, there was a Soviet propaganda machine,” he told reporters in Ankara. “Every day it created different lies. They would believe them and then expect the world to believe them.”

Calling the accusations “nonsense,” Mr. Davutoglu added, “This was an old tradition, but it has suddenly reared its head again.”

Although the United States has expressed frustration with the Turks for not doing more to control a roughly 100-mile stretch of border that faces territory controlled by the Islamic State, Washington has rejected the accusation that Ankara is acting in league with the militants.

In Belgrade, no change emerged from the 40-minute meeting between the Russian and Turkish foreign ministers, the first high-level talks in person between the two countries since the downing of the warplane.

“We haven’t heard anything new,” Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said during a news conference broadcast live in Russia. Both sides stuck to their previous positions, he said.

The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said after the meeting that the fight against the Islamic State should not get entangled with what he called the “accident” of shooting down the plane.

“Foreign militants, extremists, radicalization — these are the subjects we must focus on,” he was quoted as saying by Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

Russia has vowed to prevent any further attacks on its aircraft, including dispatching to Syria its powerful S-400 air defense system, which has a range of almost 250 miles.

The delivery of the S-300 air defense system to Iran fulfills a contract that was delayed for years during the international confrontation with Tehran over its nuclear program. The deal was signed in 2007, suspended in 2010 and reinstated last spring.

The state-run Russian news agency Tass quoted Vladimir Kozhin, the top Kremlin official responsible for military-technical cooperation, as saying the missiles were being transferred. “The contract is in action, they’ve begun,” Mr. Kozhin was quoted as saying, with no further details.

Among other countries, Israel had previously expressed concern about the delivery. The S-300 missiles would render any air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities far more difficult.

Analysts linked the delivery to the situation in Syria, where British warplanes on Thursday joined the United States-led coalition’s bombing campaign. Tehran and Moscow back President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, while the coalition, which includes Turkey, supports the opposition and would like to see Mr. Assad gone.

“Turkey is the main opponent to Russia and Iran in Syria, therefore these deliveries are connected with the overall situation in the region,” said Alexander Golts, a columnist in Moscow, noting that the Russian Air Force was supporting Iran’s ground operations in Syria.

“It is more or less clear that Iran is becoming Russia’s significant ally,” Mr. Golts said. “Therefore the Kremlin is absolutely willing to fulfill its obligations to it in full.”

Although Mr. Putin spent most of his speech on internal issues, he repeated his recent call for an international coalition to fight terrorism and said Russia was mobilizing domestically against extremism.

He spoke a day after the Islamic State released a grisly video of what it called a Russian spy having his throat cut by a fellow Russian fighting for the Islamic State. The executioner said Russian forces in the Middle East would be defeated and threatened to carry out attacks in Moscow like those in Paris on Nov. 13.

Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, confirmed that the murdered man was from his republic and vowed that the executioner would soon perish.

“Chechens remember, they know, and they will not leave it unpunished,” Mr. Kadyrov said on Thursday, speaking to reporters in the Kremlin after Mr. Putin’s speech. “Anyone who has slaughtered one of our citizens and threatens the safety of our country will not live long. We will send him to glory with a one-way ticket.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.