We have to wait and see how things go. But my own impression is that it will
take a while for Russian-Turkish relations to reestablish themselves in the degree
of cordiality that existed beforehand. It seems to me that Putin was,
quite frankly, felt a little stunned and humiliated by the way Erdoğan handled
the situation. That is to say that while Turkey was completely within its rights
under international law to shoot down the plane, there would have been other ways
to handle it, which could have been less had less damage
to Turkish-Russian relations. I had the impression, quite frankly,
that Erdoğan and the Turkish authorities were simply fed up with all the
provocations and testing of Turkey by sending planes up and violating air space
and so forth. This was not something that happened out of the blue.
There had been a lot of attempts by Russia to test the Turks to see if they
get their aircraft up in time and so forth. And I think, quite frankly,
Erdoğan just said, "Enough is enough." Of course, if they didn't violate
international air space, there would have been no question.
But the question was what to do about it if they did.
And he decided, in my view, to say very clearly,
"If you cross that line, you are going to get shot down.
We're fed up with this. We've had it, and you better realize it."
So I think he was trying to send a very strong message to Putin. Putin, of course,
doesn't like to get talked like that by anybody,
and especially the Turks. And so he then responded
rather emotionally, calling for trade sanctions, tourist cutbacks,
and other things like that. And therefore I had the impression that it
will take a while for Turkish-Russian relations to begin to get better,
that there's going to be a longer period of kind of cooling off of relations.
Unless, of course, Putin really wants to have good relations with Turkey and really
feels it's in his interest geostrategically. But his first reaction
was very emotional. In fact, there's a lot of similarities
between Erdoğan and Putin. Both of them very smart, very experienced,
but very emotionally, easily scratched, and with very thin skin.
And so I don't think that it will be easy for Putin to, sort of, say, "Oh,
I made a mistake. Let's kiss and make up."