“An unprecedented crisis,” warns Turkish daily Hürriyet on the front page of its Wednesday edition, a day after two Turkish jets shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border.
Although the downing of the plane sparked fears of increased tension between the two nations, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised speech, “We have no intention to escalate this incident. We are just defending our security and the rights of our brothers.”
Turkish authorities insist that the Russian warplane was shot after it repeatedly violated air space above the Turkish border, which Moscow denies. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the incident “a stab in the back by the terrorists’ accomplices,” before warning of “serious consequences.”
Speaking on TV Wednesday, Putin revealed that one of the pilots had managed to eject and had been rescued by the Syrian army. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu said, according to the ministry’s Twitter feed, that the country would deploy a missile cruiser near Latakia, Syria, on the Mediterranean coast, CNN reports.
