Evaluating the Fighter Jet Crisis in Turkish-Russian Relations

Abstract

Turkey and Russia developed very close relations throughout the 2000s. Yet, their growing differences about the Syrian civil war dragged the two countries into a serious crisis on November 24, 2015, when the Turkish armed forces shot down a Russian SU-24 fighter jet violating Turkey's airspace near the Syrian border. In the following seven months, political, economic and cultural links between the two countries were almost completely frozen within the framework of Russia's sanctions against Turkey. This article aims to discuss the impacts of the fighter jet crisis on Turkish-Russian relations. Although Ankara and Moscow normalized relations following President Erdogan's letter to President Putin in June 2016, it is important to understand the main factors that led to the crisis in order to make sound predictions about the future of the Turkish-Russian rapprochement process.