Why
killing of Russian diplomat may well bring Turkey and Russia closer
Putin
and Erdoğan are likely to find common ground in their desire to
blame third parties for death of Andrei Karlov
Julian Borger World
affairs editor
Monday 19 December
2016 23.26 GMT
The high-profile
murder of a Russian diplomat in Ankara has inspired fearful
comparisons with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in
1914 – and prompted some to speculate that Monday’s killing could
also provide the spark for a regional conflagration.
But Turkish and
Russian leaders moved rapidly to contain any damage to relations
between the two countries, and analysts said that Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin are likely to find common ground in the
desire to assign blame to their perceived strategic adversaries.
Both Ankara and the
Kremlin announced that a meeting of foreign and defence ministers
from Russia, Turkey and Iran to discuss the three allies’ next
steps in Syria is to go ahead as planned in Moscow.
Erdoğan called
Putin to discuss the killing of Andrei Karlov and said afterwards
they had agreed that “our cooperation and solidarity fighting
terrorism should be even stronger”.
Mustafa Akyol, a
Turkish commentator, said Erdoğan and Putin will each want to point
the finger at their perceived antagonists. “Both sides believe in a
western conspiracy to set them against each other,” he said.
Diplomatic analysts
said that neither leader had an incentive to disrupt a loose accord
they have reached over Syria, allowing each to pursue their war aims.
Turkey has ensured that its incursion into northern Syria did nothing
to weaken the siege on Aleppo by Russian and pro-Assad forces.
Meanwhile, Moscow is widely believed to have given its assent to
Turkish ambitions to take the northern Syrian town of al-Bab, to
further its aim of blocking the consolidation of a Kurdish ministate,
Rojava, on Turkey’s southern flank.
“Russia and Turkey
have every incentive to manage this crisis. The forced evacuation of
Aleppo aids in Russia’s war effort, while Turkey has won Russian
acquiescence to its efforts in [al-Bab] – which is intended to
blunt Kurdish expansionism,” said Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at
the Atlantic Council thinktank.
Russian ambassador
to Turkey shot dead in Ankara art gallery – video report
He added that the
assassination is likely to make bilateral ties more asymmetrical than
they already are. “Russia has always had the upper hand. This just
makes it stronger,” he said.
Turkey and Russia
both alleged a broader conspiracy behind Monday’s shooting.
Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yıldırım, referred to “dark
forces” operating behind the assassin. Putin referred to Karlov’s
assassination as a “provocation” aimed at derailing Russo-Turkish
ties, using a common codeword for conspiracy by Moscow’s foreign
enemies.
Pro-government
commentators in both countries were quick to suggest there must be
unseen western hands behind the killing, echoing Putin’s and
Erdoğan’s conspiratorial world views.
A Russian senator,
Frantz Klintsevich, claimed it was “highly likely that
representatives of foreign Nato secret service are behind” Karlov’s
killing. Another senator, Alexei Pushkov, blamed “political and
media hysteria” sown by Russia’s enemies, and tweeted that “the
key question is who is behind the assassination and therefore an
undeclared war on Russia”.
Erdoğan’s
supporters started broadcasting a theory that the assassin was a
supporter of Erdoğan’s political enemy Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish
cleric living in exile in the US.
The Turkish
president has blamed Gülenists for a July coup attempt against him,
using the claim as justification for arrests of ten of thousands of
alleged Gülen supporters in the government, military, judiciary and
press. Turkish calls for his extradition are a major cause of
friction in bilateral relations with the US.
Sinan Ülgen, a
former Turkish diplomat now at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, said the killing in Ankara will not cause the
same crisis in relations triggered by the Turkish shooting down of a
Russian warplane along the Syrian border in November 2015.
“This time around,
there is no willingness on either side to escalate. On the contrary,
first official statements tend to view this attack as an attempt to
derail the ongoing rapprochement between Ankara and Moscow,” Ülgen
said.
“Going forward,
Moscow will nonetheless want a thorough investigation into the nature
of the attack so as to identify the culprits. It remains to be seen
whether this was a lone wolf attack or the doing of a more organised
jihadist cell that has infiltrated Turkish law enforcement.”
Maxim Suchkov, an
expert on the Middle East at the Russian International Affairs
Council, agreed that there is no political incentive in either Moscow
or Ankara to turn the killing into a wider crisis, and argued that
fearful comparisons with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in
Sarajevo more than a century ago were misplaced.
“Russia and Turkey
have recently had substantial contacts on the senior military and
political level,” Suchkov said. “Troublesome parallels with the
beginning of the first world war are in the air but if Erdoğan
manages to carry out timely and effective crisis diplomacy with
Putin, there may be no serious consequences for the state of the
bilateral relationship ... Too much is at stake for both Moscow and
Ankara right now.”
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