A long history of mutual enmity is exacerbating tension between Turkey and Russia. Leaders in both countries are apt to view their current hostilities through the prism of a bitterly contested imperial past.
Over the past 500 years, Russians and Turks have fought 12 wars, the first in 1568 over the Astrakhan khanate, located where the Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea. The last was during World War I, a conflict that hastened the collapse of both empires.
In Turkey, nearly every military and political mishap is now blamed on Moscow – from the defeat of Syrian rebels backed by Turkey to the February 21 expulsion of a senior Turkish diplomat from Bulgaria, a country which Tsarist Russia liberated from Ottoman control.
In a 26-city survey conducted by Istanbul’s Kadir Has University last December, 64.7 percent of 1,000 respondents named Russia as the biggest threat to Turkey.
Relying on old patterns to explain present-day developments around or in Syria runs a risk for both powers, cautioned Montana State University history professor James Meyer.
“The risk is that people in Russia would allow themselves to be persuaded that ‘neo-Ottomanism’ is real, while in Turkey people would similarly come to see Russian actions in the region simply through the prism of Russian aggression,” wrote Meyer, author of “Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands.”
Russian President +Vladimir Putin sees any hopes of any rapprochement in the near future seem unlikely. Humiliated by the shoot-down incident, “Putin seems to really want to hurt Erdoğan,” said one Turkey-based Western diplomat, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the topic.
Meanwhile it is being reported that Turkish police have detained Alparslan Celik, the man who claims to be responsible for killing a Russian SU-24 bomber pilot in Turkey last November, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Friday.
An unidentified source in Turkish police confirmed that the man was in police custody.
He was arrested in the Turkish city of Izmir, along with 13 other people on Wednesday, Turkish media reported Thursday.
Celik was a field commander for groups of Turkmen militia in southern Turkey and one of the leaders of the Turkish Gray Wolves radical nationalist group that first appeared in Turkey in the 1960s.
Last November Celik said in a video interview that his group had killed one of the pilots of a Russian Su-24 bomber downed by Turkish aircraft.
The pilot, Oleg Peshkov was shot to death while parachuting to earth after his jet was hit. The other pilot survived and was later rescued by Russian and Syrian special force units.
