Turkey proposes meeting with Russian officials on avoiding future air space

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also warned Russian Federation on Tuesday against losing Turkey’s friendship, saying that Turkey can not “remain patient” in the face of violations.

Erdogan, speaking in Brussels, where North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is headquartered, cautioned that an attack against Turkey would be an attack against the entire alliance, of which his country is a member.

Stoltenberg added, “It doesn’t look like an accident, and we’ve seen two of them over the weekend”.

During talks last week, both sides agreed to a series of commitments, the source said, indicating it involved undertakings on which language pilots will use to communicate, the choice of radio frequency and the altitude at which they will operate.

The Russian defence ministry had said that an SU-30 warplane had entered Turkish air space along the border with Syria “for a few seconds” on Saturday, a mistake caused by bad weather.

Disagreement over the air space violations came after disputes over the exact aims of the Russian air campaign.

The meeting comes a day after Syrian troops and militia backed by Russian warplanes mounted what appeared to be their first major coordinated assault on Syrian insurgents on Wednesday and Moscow said its warships fired a barrage of missiles at them from the Caspian Sea, a sign of its new military reach.

Weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin received permission from the Russian Parliament to intervene in Syrian war, the ground equations are shifting.

Separately, a high-ranking military official in Syria told AFP that claims Moscow was allegedly preparing for a ground intervention was a Western attempt at diminishing Russia’s role.

“For the first time, the strikes were accompanied by fighting on the ground between regime forces and rebels”, said the director of the UK-based group, Rami Abdel Rahman.

Bogdanovsky’s visit is expected to take care of that: The Russian general discussed with his Israeli counterpart, Gen. Yair Golan, the establishment of a joint mechanism to “deconflict” military actions by the Israel Defense Forces and Russian units.

Syria’s ambassador to Russian Federation, Riad Haddad, said Wednesday that around 40% of ISIS infrastructure had been destroyed since Moscow’s military operation began, Russia’s state-run Sputnik worldwide reported.

Russian officials are accusing Islamic State fighters of hiding among the civilian population, and they say Russian warplanes have canceled attacks whenever there was a possibility of hurting non-combatants.

Russia’s adventurous gamble to launch airstrikes in Syria, its most ambitious military campaign outside erstwhile Soviet borders in more than three decades, has risked a full-fledged Syrian war on a global scale. Russia’s biggest fear, shared by the United States, is that IS fighters will sweep south from their stronghold in Raqqa and overrun the capital Damascus, the key to achieving their goal of carving out a “caliphate”.

“It´s further evidence that they are not thinking things through very well,” he said.

Russia’s latest air strikes in Syria included targeting IS-controlled sites around Palmyra. Officials quoted by state media said there would be no ground operation in Syria and – in contrast to what officials had said earlier – Russian Federation would try to prevent any “volunteers” from going to Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group tracking Syria’s civil war, said the Palmyra strikes killed 15 Islamic State fighters.