Even if Turkey is right that a Russian fighter jet strayed into its airspace, the plane was within Ankara’s borders for just 17 seconds before being attacked – and was making no hostile moves against the Turks.
Airspace incursions, granted usually in less politically tense contexts, happen all the time, and generally you’d expect warning shots to be fired and then attempts to force the intruder to leave or to land.
That the Turks shot down the jet and did so within 17 seconds – with the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, saying he gave the order to fire himself – suggests very strongly they were waiting for a Russian plane to come into or close enough to Turkish airspace with the aim of delivering a rather pyrotechnic message.
In this respect, it is understandable that the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the attack a provocation and an ambush.
Moscow may have been foolish to let its planes stray so close to the border – doubly so if its rules of engagement allowed pilots to dip into Turkish airspace when it was operationally useful (as is likely). But Turkey’s response went way beyond the usual practice.
In 2012, the Syrians shot down a Turkish jet which had entered its airspace, and Erdoğan’s furious response at the time was that “a short-term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack”.
(At the time, the then Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen called it “another example of the Syrian authorities’ disregard for international norms”. There hasn’t been a similar critique of Ankara.)
Yet no one wants this conflict to escalate, and both Ankara and Moscow are working to that end. Presumably Erdoğan feels satisfied the point has been made, and presumably Moscow, while no doubt harbouring its grudges, is aware it has a great deal of lost diplomatic ground to make up and wants to be able to strike a deal with the west over Syria and Ukraine.
To this end, while Putin was angry (“a stab in the back”) and Erdoğan obstinate (“everyone should respect the right of Turkey to defend its borders”), their respective foreign ministers are doing what foreign ministers do and trying to bring things back to the diplomatic track.
Analyst Pavel Felgenhauer has suggested that “further dogfights are possible during which Russian planes will attack Turkish planes in order to protect our bombers. Sea battles between the Turkish and Russian fleets are possible”.
But in fact, the mechanisms in place to control conflict remain robust. Nato is aware that Turkey is an ally, but is not piling in to increase the tension; Russia knows that while it may have a certain moral authority in this incident, but if it turns to military pressure then Nato must back its maverick ally.
There are striking similarities between Erdoğan’s Turkey and Putin’s Russia, not least their ability and propensity to move conflicts into the covert arena. While Russia’s intervention in Syria may have cynical intent, the Turks are acting in support of their national interests in Syria with equal ruthlessness.
Ankara is often guilty of neglecting attacks on Isis and hitting the Kurds (who are in so many ways the most effective force against the jihadists) instead, smuggling weapons in the guise of humanitarian convoys (something we saw the Russians doing in Ukraine), and being willing to support groups which are often jihadist in their own terms. Turkish military intelligence organisation (MIT) is every bit as cynically opportunist as the Russian military spy agency (GRU), and Erdoğan every bit as erratic, brutal and ambitious as Putin.
As the analysts Fiona Hill and Kemal Kirişci have put it, “the personalities and political styles of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian president Vladimir Putin seemed to complement if not mirror each other” such that these “similarities … have now come into play in a dramatic way.”
While the overt clashes may be headed off by the usual machinery of diplomacy, both countries – with large, extensive, secretive and brutal intelligence apparatuses and a history of working with both gangsters and terrorists – may well instead simply transfer these tensions to the covert arena.
In Syria itself, the Russians are likely to put greater emphasis on attacking those groups under Ankara’s patronage. A strike on a Turkish aid convoy may be the first manifestation of this.
Meanwhile, the Turks will presumably arm and encourage those groups most able to give the Russians a bloody nose.
In this way, what wasn’t really a proxy war before is likely to become one.
Meanwhile, Moscow may put greater emphasis on countering Turkey’s efforts to establish regional influence (Azerbaijan is an obvious place of contention) and could support problematic non-state actors inside Turkey, from Kurds to criminals (at least, those criminals not already tied to the Turkish state).
This is a conflict that Ankara triggered and while it is being managed it is not going to go away. Nor is it just going to become another chapter in the histories of Russo-Ottoman rivalry. Expect to see this play out in snide, deniable, but nonetheless bitter actions for months to come.