Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet was a confrontation waiting to happen

THE SHOOTING down by Turkey of a Russian Su-24 fighter-bomber on Tuesday morning—the first time a NATO member has admitted bringing down a Russian warplane since the end of the cold war—was in many ways a confrontation waiting to happen. Syria has become a messy battleground with outside powers supporting different proxy factions and, increasingly, intervening directly in the country’s civil war. Russian, American and French air forces have all bombed targets in Syria with worryingly little co-ordination.

Turkey, in particular, has repeatedly cautioned Russia to keep its planes on the Syrian side of the border, after an intrusion by a Russian jet in October. While Russia is supporting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey has made little secret of wanting to see him gone and of supporting Sunni rebel groups.

On November 24th, according to a statement by Turkish armed forces, a plane of “unknown origin” was intercepted by a pair of F-16s and ordered 10 times within five minutes to leave Turkish airspace. The Turks say they shot it down after it ignored the warnings. Russia reported the loss of its plane soon afterwards, and says it can prove it was over Syria the entire time. Videos distributed online showed the two pilots parachuting out of the plane, but Syrian rebel forces claimed to have killed both of them. The downing of the plane is the first shooting incident between the multiple armed powers intervening on various sides in Syria’s savage and intricate civil war, and it has escalated and confused the situation further.

A livid Vladimir Putin minced no words in his response, calling the downing a “stab in the back” by “accomplices” of the Islamic State (IS). Mr Putin, speaking ahead of a meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan in the Russian town of Sochi, accused the Turkish government of protecting IS in Syria and allowing its oil trade to flourish across the Turkish border. “Do they want to put NATO at the service of IS?” Mr Putin fumed. He insisted that the Russian jet was flying in Syrian airspace, and posed no threat to Turkey. “We will never tolerate such crimes,” Mr Putin ominously warned, adding that the consequences for Russian-Turkish relations will be “serious”.

Despite Mr Putin’s visible anger, a direct military response against Turkey is unlikely. Instead, the Kremlin may take an asymmetric approach. Joint energy projects, including the proposed Turkish Stream pipeline, could be put on hold. Turkey, which imports some 20% of its energy from Russia, may find those supplies at risk as well. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, scrapped a planned visit to Ankara and called on Russians to avoid travelling to Turkey due to the alleged risk of terrorism, endangering Turkish tourism revenues. Russian travel agencies have already begun cancelling tours. The battlefield in Syria also offers opportunities for revenge by proxy: Russian bombers may pay extra attention to Syrian rebel groups with ties to Turkey. Russia could also offer increased support to the Kurdish forces that Ankara so despises.

The Russian jet’s downing further highlights the competing agendas at work in Syria. François Hollande, France’s president, will visit Moscow on Thursday to drum up support for an anti-IS alliance following the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13th. France wants Mr Assad, who has overseen the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, to step down. But Mr Hollande has made clear that a greater priority is to strengthen the fight against IS. Mr Putin, meanwhile, spent Monday in Iran with the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and its president, Hassan Rouhani, where they affirmed their support for the embattled Syrian leader.

For Turkey, the downing of the jet is the culmination of months of intense frustration over Russia’s intervention. In recent days Turkish anger has focused on Russian air strikes near the Turkish border against villages of the Turkmen ethnicity, many of which support anti-government rebels. The Russian Su-24 seems to have been on its way to strike the Turkmen, and it was Turkmen rebels who claimed to have shot the pilots.

Turks feel a sense of historical kinship with the Turkmen. The media have given heavy coverage to about 1,500 Turkmen refugees who have fled to Turkey to escape the Russian raids. On November 20th the Turks summoned Russia’s ambassador; a spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry said the Russians “were bombing civilian Turkmen villages, not fighting terror”. Nationalist activists have rallied in support of the Turkmen. Last week some attempted to pelt the Russian consulate in Istanbul with eggs, but instead accidentally egged the nearby consulate of the Netherlands, which has a similar flag.

Whether or not Turkey’s sympathy for the Turkmen played a role in the downing of the Russian fighter, its allies will be more concerned with the larger stakes at play in Syria. NATO ambassadors were scheduled to meet at 5pm on Tuesday at the organisation’s headquarters in Belgium. The aim of most of the NATO members will be to de-escalate a conflict between Turkey and Russia that has given a needless twist to the already baffling Syrian pretzel. But both Mr Putin and Mr Erdogan are proud men, and a face-saving formula will be hard to find.