Putin relents on South Stream as Erdogan offers Turkish Stream promises

Russia and Turkey took a big step toward normalising ties yesterday when Russian President Vladimir Putin met his visiting Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan, at a time when both countries have strained relations with the West.

Turkey and Russian Federation have agreed to build a mechanism on Syria which includes officials from the intelligence services, foreign ministries and armed forces, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said here on Wednesday. At the time, Putin said the downing of the plane was a “stab in the back delivered to us by accomplices of terrorist”.

“Your visit today, which you made despite the really complex domestic political situation in Turkey, shows we all want to restart our dialogue and restore our relations”, said Putin, addressing Erdogan.

Earlier, Bloomberg reported that Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said “Bulgaria and Russian Federation agreed to resurrect the canceled South Stream natural gas pipeline across the Black Sea, and the Belene nuclear power plant”.

His visit to Moscow marked full restoration of relations after last year’s Turkish shootdown of a Russian warplane operating over Syria.

Those projects were put on ice with trade between the two countries plunging 43 percent in January-May this year to $6.1 billion, and Turkey’s tourism industry seeing visitor numbers from Russian Federation fall by 93 percent.

The Russian president said that the Turkish side had stressed that economic issues arose due to visa restrictions in the transport sector.

“We don’t view this as a zero-sum game”.

Two months prior to the jet crisis, the two countries had set a goal to increase mutual trade volume to $100 billion by 2023.

“Support for European Union membership used to be around 50 percent of the population, I assume it is around 20 percent now”, he said.

He added that more specific meetings would be held on issues related to the settlement of Syrian crisis.

The newspaper said the meeting’s duration – nearly two hours – showed that Erdogan and Putin were enthusiastic about normalization.

Calling Putin his “dear friend”, Erdogan said Turkey is ready to implement a natural gas pipeline project with Russian Federation and a deal to build Turkey’s first nuclear power plant.

Idrissov recalled that Kazakhstan’s leader Nursultan Nazarbayev contributed to patching up relations between Moscow and Ankara.