Putin mends broken relations with Turkey's Erdogan
August 10, 2016 00:20
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday promised to reinvigorate ties after their first meeting since Ankara shot down a Russian warplane last November.
Erdogan's visit to Putin's hometown of Saint Petersburg is also his first foreign trip since the failed coup against him last month that sparked a purge of opponents and cast a shadow over Turkey's relations with the West.
"We lived through a very complicated moment in the relations between our states and we very much want, and I feel our Turkish friends want, to overcome the difficulties," Putin told journalists at a joint press conference after the encounter.
The Kremlin leader insisted it would take "painstaking work" and "some time" to return to previous trade levels as Russia looks to roll back a series of economic sanctions against Ankara, but both sides said they wanted to restart major energy projects hit by the crisis.
Erdogan said that he hoped Russian-Turkish relations would become "more robust" and stressed how important it was that Putin offered his support after the coup.
"We will bring our relations back to the old level and even beyond, both sides are determined and have the necessary will," he said.
The shooting down of a Russian fighter jet by a Turkish F-16 over the Syrian border last fall saw a furious Putin slap economic sanctions on Turkey and launch a blistering war of words with Erdogan that seemed to irrevocably damage burgeoning ties.
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