His name is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, or as the TV news program
hosted by the Kremlin’s main ideologue described him on Sunday night, “an
unrestrained and deceitful man hooked on cheap oil from the barbaric caliphate”
— referring to the Islamic State.
Not long ago, Mr. Erdogan
earned about the warmest accolade possible from President Vladimir V. Putin. He described the Turkish
president as “a strong man,” willing to stand up to the West. That was then.
Ever since the Turkish Air
Force shot down a Russian warplane last week that Turkey accused of
violating its airspace, Mr. Putin has been calling Mr. Erdogan a back stabber.
Mr. Erdogan has not taken on Mr. Putin directly, but even as he has softened
his tone, he has refused to apologize for the downing of the fighter jet. And a
pro-government Turkish newspaper recently ran a headline saying “Putin tries to
deceive the world with his lies,” a reference to Moscow’s actions in the war in Syria.
The animosity between Russia
and Turkey has been growing for years because they back different sides in
Syria’s civil war, with Russia intervening to buttress the government of
President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawi Shiite, and Turkey backing the Sunni
majority and pushing for Mr. Assad to leave office.
But in the wake of the
warplane’s downing, the two men’s personal styles — including an unwillingness
to compromise — are further inflaming the tensions.
Those resentments now threaten
to at least prolong the bloody, intractable conflict in Syria, and have raised
fears that NATO could be dragged in if the conflict between Russia and Turkey
escalates.
“The problem is that you have
two presidents who are both highly status conscious and both high-risk
players,” said Ivan Krastev, a political scientist who is chairman of the
Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. “Not looking weak is
something very important for both Putin and Erdogan. Neither knows how to
retreat, nor apologize. In that way they are like twins.”
Both men are often described
as combative, uncompromising, nationalistic and authoritarian. Mr. Putin
changed jobs to keep running his country, switching between the post of prime
minister and president; Mr. Erdogan has done the same and wants to revamp the
Turkish Constitution to give more powers to the presidency.
Both are trying to restore
luster to the empires that were lost in World War I — Czarist Russia and the
Ottoman Empire. One is sometimes derisively likened to a czar, and the other a
sultan. Both nurse a sense of historical grievance that the West does not fully
accept them.
The two leaders profess to
respect the rule of law but are widely criticized for ignoring it when it
threatens their reach. They have unleashed the courts or the tax authorities to
silence criticism from big business and opposition media.
Mr. Putin is well known for
cracking down on his opposition. Mr. Erdogan is building his own reputation for
harsh treatment; scores of people have been investigated on charges of
insulting the president and several foreign journalists have been deported.
Both tend to blame external,
global conspiracies for failures.
Or as the Russian opposition
leader Alexei Navalny wrote on his blog last week: “They both talk foreign
policy nonsense to distract citizens from internal problems. Both use imperial
ambitions, imperial rhetoric to strengthen their personal power and personal
enrichment. Both hate social and news media. Both call the West their enemy and
appeal to traditional values, while they both are immoral.”
They also enjoy soaring
popularity ratings at home, which gives them a sense of impunity. The two men
are such mirror images of each other, in fact, analysts said, that they are
unlikely to be able to resolve the dispute over the plane without outside
mediation.
“They do not trust each
other,” Mr. Krastev said. “There is too much ambition on both sides.”
Mr. Putin has demanded a
public apology for the downing of the military jet and compensation from the
Turkish leadership. The extent of Mr. Putin’s pique is perhaps best reflected
by the repeated accusations on Russian state television that Mr. Erdogan’s son
is deeply involved in the black market trade in oil extracted by the Islamic
State, the terrorist group that has taken over parts of Iraq and Syria — and
whose Egyptian affiliate recently took responsibility for downing a Russian
passenger jet in Sinai.
Mr. Erdogan strongly denied
the allegations. “They are lies; they are slander. We have never, never had
this kind of commercial relationship with any terror organization,” Mr. Erdogan
said in an interview with France 24 last week. “They have to prove it, and if
they can, Tayyip Erdogan will leave office.”
Still, Mr. Erdogan did seem to
be trying to dial back after first demanding that Russia apologize over what
Turkey said was a violation of its airspace, and direct military confrontation
seems unlikely. By the weekend, he said, “We are truly saddened by this
incident.”
“In his own way he is trying
to apologize, but I don’t think Putin is receptive,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a
Turkish fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Or as Dmitry Kiselyev, the
Kremlin ideologue, said pointedly Sunday night, “The hotline has been switched
off.” In the hourlong news program, which was devoted almost entirely to
bashing Turkey, he added, “Has Erdogan lost his marbles?”
It was not always thus. A year
ago the two leaders seemed born allies as they agreed that Russia would invest
in a major gas pipeline, known as the Turkish Stream, that would pump Russian
gas through Turkey to Europe as an alternative to the one across the Balkans
that the European Union had opposed. Indeed, the two leaders pledged to more
than triple their roughly $30 billion annual trade to $100 billion dollars by
2020.
The fact that Mr. Erdogan
openly boasted about the project at a time when the West was calling for wider
sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis prompted Mr. Putin to call him
a “strong man.”
Right after the Russian
military jet was shot down, Turkish trucks began to back up at the Russian
border, as the government food watchdog suddenly discovered problems with the
produce that it had praised a year ago as exceptional. It is not clear whether
the Turkish Stream and other major projects will be affected by planned
sanctions.
It is also unclear if the two
leaders will try to work out their differences this week. Both are due in Paris
on Monday for the global climate change conference. Mr. Erdogan said
that he had called the Kremlin to suggest that they meet on the sidelines to
help defuse the crisis. Mr. Putin’s only public response so far was a decree
issued late Saturday night ordering up a list of vaguely defined economic
sanctions against Turkey.
In the end, some analysts say,
a continued confrontation with Turkey, hot or cold, could work to Mr. Putin’s
advantage, possibly speeding his goal of lifting Western sanctions imposed
after his country’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Replacing Moscow’s
heated anti-Western criticism with a new target might improve Russia’s
estranged ties with the West.
“If you are the military
chieftain and there is no way to switch back to electoral legitimacy, you need
enemies,” said Nicolai Petrov, a political scientist at the Higher School of
Economics. “Turkey is the best candidate.”
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