VT wishes Turkey “good luck with that”

On a personal note, Turkey is a fine country with wonderful people, lots of cool ruins and great food.  VT loves Turkey and VT staffers have many good friends in Turkey, some run their army, their navy, and their intelligence services.

Photo posted so their families know they are alive and well, or at least moderately well.  WE hope they will be released to their families as soon as the current unpleasantness is sorted out.  These are division level officers.

Sputnik/Moscow: Earlier this week, the ambassador revealed that the recent rise in tensions between Moscow and Ankara over Russian support for Syria in Idlib had led to threats being made against his life, recalling that the last crisis in relations between the two countries led to the assassination of his predecessor by a Turkish radical.

Russian Ambassador to Turkey Alexei Yerkhov has expanded on his earlier comments about the threats he and embassy staff have had to deal with in recent days, stressing that while he does not take them to heart, they’re unacceptable because he is a representative of Russia.



“As far as the threats are concerned, we’ve discussed them at length, and even publicized the most odious ones. Among the last which we’ve received last night and this morning are comments such as ‘We’ll build skyscrapers out of the skulls of your army’, and ‘You’ll pay the price for every drop of blood you shed’, and so on,” Yerkhov said, speaking to Zvezda on Sunday.

The ambassador noted that he could not help but treat this subject with the utmost seriousness since it’s not simply a matter of threats against himself.

“Someone may say that this is a case of people letting off some steam and moving on, someone else may say this is democratic. It’s hard to disagree with these viewpoints. But at the same time such actions are unacceptable because we’re not talking about the embassy or the ambassador, but about Russia and all of its representatives,” Yerkhov stressed.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, speaks with the new Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Alexei Yerkhov, as he submits his credentials, in Ankara, Turkey

“Why are the threats unacceptable? Because threats against Russia in themselves are a factor in the radicalization of public sentiment – they are read and accepted. Those who write them may not be fully aware of it, but they are starting a chain reaction of xenophobia, anger, and hatred which can find a real-world manifestation. Many experts have recalled that the information and propaganda situation emerging in recent days is reminiscent of the one which reigned five years ago, and we all remember how that ended,” the ambassador warned, referring to the 2015 murder of Russian ambassador Andrei Karlov in Ankara in late 2016 in the wake of the crisis in Russian-Turkish relations following the 2015 Turkish shootdown of a Russian aircraft over Syria.

According to Yerkhov, he is worried at least of all about his personal security. Praising Turkish authorities for the professionalism they’ve shown in protecting him, he stressed that everything possible must be done to prevent inciting anger, hate, and hostility between Turks and Russians because it’s impossible to protect all employees of foreign organizations or to isolate all Russian nationals in Turkey.

At the same time, the diplomat suggested that the current tensions “could threaten the entire complex of Russian-Turkish relations…which was painstakingly constructed by the efforts of tens of thousands of people, starting with our countries’ presidents, who made a considerable personal contribution to the development of these bilateral relations.”

On Saturday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it expected Turkey to do everything in its power to ensure the safety of Russian diplomats and tourists in the country. Earlier, Turkish media reported that a group of teen vandals had desecrated twenty Christian graves at Ortakoy cemetery in Ankara, including the graves of Russian immigrants.

Relations between Russia and Turkey cooled this week following the deaths of over half a dozen Turkish troops in a Syrian artillery strike in Idlib, Syria. The attack escalated into a shooting war between Syrian and Turkish forces, with Ankara threatening a full-scale offensive if Syrian troops didn’t withdraw from the de-escalation zone.

Moscow has accused Ankara of failing to live up to its commitments to separate moderate opposition fighters from terrorist militants and has warned against further escalations. Syria, which launched its Idlib operation in December following repeated attacks on its forces, has said that it will continue to conduct anti-terrorist operations in Idlib and elsewhere in Syrian territory regardless of Turkish threats to intervene.

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4 COMMENTS

  1. Historical milestones about Turkey:
    – Illegal occupation of northern part of the Republic of Cyprus, which it invaded with a bloody military campaign in 1974
    – Turkey and Azerbaijan have been exercising an illegal economic blockade against Armenia, which is in clear violation of many General Assembly of UN resolutions condemning unilateral coercive measures.
    – Turkey violates the Greek sovereign airspace countless times as a national sport or hobby whenever it feels like it
    – It’s been proven Turkey’s involvement with training and arming ISIS with Saudi-Arabian financing
    – Turkey has violated over 40 UN rules and mandates against Armenia in the last 20 years alone!
    – Turkey has violated over 100 UN rules and mandates against it’s neighbours in the last 10 years alone!
    – Freedom and sovereignty are for Turks only. Kurds and others are just to be murdered or to be Turkey’s servants. This has been the state policy of Turkey ever since it was founded in 1923.
    – 700+years of unbroken history of genocides by the Turks against several nations; Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Pontic, Syriac, Chaldeans, Yezidis and more…

    Hell will freeze over first and pigs will fly before Turkey

  2. The coup to remove Erdogan couple of years ago failed with the help of the Russians. They were the ones who alerted him of the coup and let him survive and cause all the grief to his citizens.
    Russia is as criminal as Turkey, USA & Israel.
    Nowadays there are no countries that are fairly governed, it’s all power hungry governments who are criminal in nature.
    When money is involved, humanity is desregarded.

  3. Turkey; great place, good people, great food, that is what VT says in this article. However, a search on VT for “Armenian Genocide” results in scores of references. Unrepentant Turkey was predicated on genocide, executed under cover of WWI. Not only was the Republic of Turkey created atop bones of millions of non-Turks, subject to ISIS-like extermination like insects, but their plundered wealth and property formed the economic basis for the early republic. Many large Turkish entities today were created with the looted wealth of those exterminated. The damage this genocide claimed on the Armenian people is conservatively approaching four trillion dollars.

    If Turkey is looking for bones to build skyscrapers, the bones of the entire Ottoman Turkish Third Army still lay around Sarikamish, which was defeated by the Russian Caucasus Army by January 1915, about 175 km west from where I am writing this.

    Yerevan, Armenia

  4. Looks like Erdogan will be taken out but an actual coup that won’t be CIA orchestrated if I’m reading my tea leaves correctly.

Comments are closed.