Ankara: Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Tuesday went back on an earlier offer of compensation to Russia for shooting down one of Moscow’s military jets in November, media reported.
“Compensating Russia is not on the table, we have only expressed our regrets,” CNN-Turk cited Yildirim as saying, hours after he said Ankara was ready to offer compensation for the incident that shattered ties between the two countries.
Speaking on public TV network TRT late Monday, Yildirim had said: “We have said that if necessary we are ready to pay compensation.”
The confusion came a day after a major breakthrough in the diplomatic crisis between the two countries - which back opposing sides in the Syrian war - with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reaching out a hand of conciliation.
The Kremlin said Erdogan had apologised for the incident, which took place along the Turkish-Syrian border.
But Turkish officials said Erdogan had written to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to “express his regrets” over the incident rather than issue an outright apology.
Despite the retraction of the compensation offer, Erdogan and Putin are due to speak by phone on Wednesday for the first time since the plane was shot down, the Kremlin said.
Putin’s spokesman said Tuesday however that it will take time to mend ties with Turkey.
Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday called the apology from Erdogan “a very important” step but added that the ties between the two countries would not go back to where they were overnight.
“Together we will have to take more than one step to meet each other,” Peskov said. “One shouldn’t think that everything will be mended overnight. We will keep up our work in that direction.”
Putin denounced the downing of the Russian warplane at the Syrian border on Nov. 24 as a “treacherous stab in the back.” Russia rejected the Turkish claim that the plane had violated its airspace, and responded by deploying long-range air defense missiles to its base in Syria, warning that they would destroy any target posing a threat to Russian aircraft.
The plane’s downing came amid a rift between Moscow and Ankara over Syria, where they backed the opposing sides in the conflict.
Moscow moved swiftly to ban the sales of package tours to Turkey, which had depended heavily on the Russian tourist flow” banned most of Turkey’s food exports” and introduced restrictions against Turkish construction companies, which had won a sizable niche of the Russian market.
In contrast to Peskov Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Tuesday that the ties are already getting better: “We can say that the ice has melted and that the process of normalization has started.”
Along with the formal apology Moscow said it expected Ankara to pay compensation to the family of the killed pilot.
Asked about the possible compensation, Yildirim said in comments carried by the Anadolu news agency on Tuesday that “there is no such thing. We only expressed our regrets, we shared their grief.” He added that Turkey will go ahead with the prosecution of the men responsible for the pilot’s death.
