The New York Times reports on the results of the Monday meeting between the President of Russia Vladimir Putin and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The American newspaper presents Putin’s decision to redirect the South Stream pipeline to Turkey as a rare diplomatic defeat for Russia.
“President Vladimir V. Putin said Monday that he would scrap Russia’s South Stream gas pipeline, a grandiose project that was once intended to establish the country’s dominance in southeastern Europe but instead fell victim to Russia’s increasingly toxic relationship with the West. It was a rare diplomatic defeat for Mr. Putin, who said Russia would redirect the pipeline to Turkey. He painted the failure to build the pipeline as a loss for Europe and blamed Brussels for its intransigence.
If there was one winner it was Turkey, which, along with China and other energy-hungry developing nations, has been exploiting the East-West rift to gain long-term energy supplies at bargain prices. Mr. Putin pointed that out on Monday during a news conference in Ankara with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, saying Turkey would receive a discount on gas and an additional three billion cubic meters of gas annually,” The NYT says.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. and Turkish officials have narrowed their differences over a joint military mission in Syria that would give the U.S. and its coalition partners permission to use Turkish air bases to launch strike operations against Islamic State targets across northern Syria, according to officials in both countries.
“As part of the deal, U.S. and Turkish officials are discussing the creation of a protected zone along a portion of the Syrian border that would be off-limits to Assad regime aircraftand would provide sanctuary to Western-backed opposition forces and refugees. U.S. and coalition aircraft would use Incirlik and other Turkish air bases to patrol the zone, ensuring that rebels crossing the border from Turkey don’t come under attack there,” The Wall Street Journal states.
BBC News publishes an article headlined “Putin problem gives Nato headache.” It is devoted to the agenda of the upcoming meeting of Nato foreign ministers in Brussels this week. The author states that it will be dominated by the crisis in Ukraine and the wider ramifications of the deteriorating relationship between Moscow and the West. The article has an openly anti-Russian character and says that “Moscow's approach is carefully calibrated to avoid a big response and Nato must find ways of responding as an alliance to what at first may appear to be pinpricks against one of its members, but an attack nonetheless that could gain in intensity if no adequate response is forthcoming”.
