Writing for Bloomberg, Marc Champion has an interesting take on the current imbroglio between Moscow and Ankara:
Russian leaders have evidently been shocked by Turkey's deliberate decision to shoot down one of their planes, which they say was motivated by Turkey's alleged support for Islamic State and greed for the proceeds of smuggled terrorist oil. A simpler explanation is that Russia would have done the same.
Here is the hypothetical: What would President Vladimir Putin do if civil war broke out in a neighboring country, which had been part of the Russian empire for centuries before breaking away under circumstances, and with borders, that Russians still found difficult to accept? What would he do if, in that war, some of the rebels were ethnic Russians at risk of being brutally crushed by the armed forces of the neighboring state?
Actually, that's not so hypothetical; it pretty much describes eastern Ukraine. And we know what Russia did -- it became heavily involved in a poorly concealed invasion.
Syria was under Ottoman control from 1516 until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Russian Empire took over the Donbass region in the mid-1700s. The "Turkmen" rebels that Russia's Su-24 aircraft was bombing at the time it was shot down are ethnic Turks. They ended up on the wrong side of the border when it was imposed by a 1921 treaty (shortly before the Donbass region was incorporated into Soviet Ukraine).
Even the strange psychology of how former empires feel they still have a special right, even responsibility, to intervene in long-since amputated parts is similar. When pro-democracy protests began in Syria in 2011, Erdogan said Turkey had to view the turmoil in Syria as a domestic issue. He was affronted when President Bashar al-Assad refused to do as he was told.
Since the shoot-down earlier this week, Turkey's President has all but admitted that his country deliberately targeted the Sukhoi because of what Russia was doing to the Turkmen rebels. "We have no intention to escalate this incident. We are just defending our security and the rights of our brothers," Erdogan said. As aggressive as the Turkish decision to down a Russian jet over a technical, 17-second airspace infringement was, Erdogan has not gone as far as Putin to assert his right to intervene militarily to protect ethnic kin, anytime, anywhere.
Now consider how Putin would react if the U.S. or North Atlantic Treaty Organization decided to get involved militarily in eastern Ukraine, placing an airbase and Patriot missile batteries 50 miles from the Russian border. Picture NATO aircraft providing airpower for an all-out Ukrainian ground assault against the Russian-backed rebels, aided by troops from Poland and Chechnya (in Syria's case, that's Iran and Hezbollah). Imagine Turkish and American jets flying into Russian airspace as they try to optimize their bombing runs.
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Meanwhile, the United Kingdom is stil mulling whether to sign up for air strikes on Syrian territory:
Russian security forces claim to have killed some Islamic militants in the Caucasus:
Just in case you were wondering how long it would take Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to stick his oar in: