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Turkey wants faster delivery of Russian missile system
Russia will accelerate delivery of the S-400 surface-to-air missile system to Turkey, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday at press conference in Moscow with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu.
Moscow and Ankara signed a US $2.5bn agreement on the procurement of Russia’s most advanced missile system in December. The delivery of the first instalment to Turkey was scheduled to begin in early 2020. The agreement raised concern in Europe and the US because the Russian system cannot be integrated into NATO’s military architecture. Turkey is the first NATO member state to purchase the S-400 missile system.
Lavrov said yesterday that: “We discussed military-technical cooperation, including the implementation of the signed contract for the delivery of S-400 system to Turkey. I can only say that in response to the request of our Turkish partners to speed up the originally planned delivery terms, we reacted positively,” Lavrov said.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who was on a two-day visit to Moscow to hold talks with Russian officials as part of the 6th Joint Strategic Planning Group, described Russia as “one of Turkey’s most important partners” in the economy and politics. He also confirmed that both countries will hold a High-Level Cooperation Council meeting at the presidential level in Turkey in the coming months.
Turkish forces in northern Syria have now encircled Afrin, a city where some 350,000 civilians remain. Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan had said that Turkey’s military and its rebel allies would capture the Syrian town by Wednesday evening, but it has yet to do so.
Erdoğan accused NATO of double standards for not helping the Turkish offensive. “We have a 911-kilometer border [with Syria] and terrorist organisations are harassing us constantly from this border. The Syrian regime is also taking the same measures. When will you show up? We now define the forces that we said were our allies and friends according to the actions they take in the field, not by the words they say to us,” he said.