Turkey’s president expresses regret for downing of Russian fighter jet
The Russian president said he’s ready to cooperate with France as well as the U.S.-led coalition.
CRI’s Li Jianhua has more. Russia’s stated military mandate when it entered into the Syrian conflict at the start of September on behalf of the Syrian government was to eliminate “terrorists”.
Hollande was in Malta following a three-hour meeting in the Kremlin late Thursday after which Putin offered a tentative nod toward cooperation with the alliance.
Addressing reporters in Moscow on Thursday, Putin said “we informed our American partners” about when and where Russian aircraft would be operating.
“I think that the introduction of visas will definitely allow us to pull aside these suspicious people as visa-free travel is a wide open gateway since everyone comes upon showing their passport and it is nearly impossible to count them out or trace”. Russian Federation has maintained a long-standing relationship with the Assad administration, going back to the days of the former Soviet Union, when Bashar’s father Hafez authorized the creation of a Soviet Naval facility in Syria. “We will exchange information about whom to hit and whom not to hit”, Hollande told a news conference. This transition will have to achieve a constitution, and elections including all the communities as well as the members of the diaspora.
Turkey and Russian Federation have also traded blows over Islamic State, with each side accusing the other of being soft on terrorism.
Erdogan’s expression of regret Saturday was the first since Tuesday’s incident in which Turkish F-16 jets shot down the Russian jet on grounds that it had violated Turkey’s airspace despite repeated warnings to change course.
A wave of terrorist outrages including a suicide bombing in Ankara, the downing of a Russian tourist jet in Egypt and an armed assault on a hotel frequented by foreigners in Mali has galvanized global efforts to combat Islamic State and seek a resolution to the festering conflict in Syria.
“The Islamic State should be weakened seriously and squeezed from the occupied territories and it should be deprived of the consolidated basis it possesses in the form of 40% of Iraq’s land and 30% of Syria’s land”. For CRI, this is Li Jianhua.