REUTERS, November 30, 2015 – Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu dismissed any suggestion that Ankara should apologize for shooting down a Russian warplane in its airspace last week, after winning NATO support for the right to defend itself.
“No country should ask us to apologize,” Prime Minister Davutoğlu told reporters following a meeting with NATO’s secretary general at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. “The protection of our land borders, our airspace, is not only a right, it is a duty,” he said. “We apologize for committing mistakes, not for doing our duty.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Nov. 26 he is waiting for an apology after Turkey’s air force shot down the Su-24 fighter jet along the Turkey-Syria border.
Following the meeting with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg in which he won the alliance’s firm support for the right to self-defense, Davutoğlu also warned that such incidents continued to be a risk as long as Russia and the US-led coalition bombing Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria worked separately.
“If there are two coalitions functioning in the same airspace against ISIL, these types of incidents will be difficult to prevent,” Davutoğlu.
Moscow’s surprise intervention in the four-year-old Syrian civil war in September wrong-footed the West and put Turkey, which shares a long border with Syria, directly at odds with Russian support for the Assad regime there.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also said NATO allies are concerned about the increased Russian presence in the region, but the focus is on calming the current situation. Stoltenberg expressed NATO’s support for Turkey over the downed Russian jet, saying all allies fully support Turkey’s right to defend its airspace.
