Russia bans to inflict economic pain on Turkey: Commentator

Press TV has interviewed Fred Weir, a journalist and political commentator in Moscow, to discuss the remarks made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, announcing that the country will suspend the visa-free regime with Turkey as of the beginning of 2016.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Mr. Lavrov there saying that Turkey has crossed the line. Will this visa regime, the canceling of this have much of an effect, do you think?  

Weir: Well yes. I think one immediate effect it is going to have is to pretty well stop the flow of Russian tourists to Turkey. Four million Russian tourists went to Turkey last year and that is the biggest number of people after Germans. So it is a huge part of the Turkish tourism industry that is going to get hit.

And in Moscow they are discussing a whole raft of other sanctions like cracking down on Turkish construction companies who do a lot of work in Russia, maybe halting that gas pipeline project under the Black Sea. I mean these kinds of economic measures are going to hurt both sides. The sanctions are never really one-sided tool but they certainly will inflict a lot of economic pain on Turkey.

Press TV: President Erdogan has said that all of these reactions from Russia are emotional and unfitting of politicians, those were his words I believe yesterday itself. Is Russia being emotional?  

Weir: Well yes, they are being emotional but they also think they have a point. This shoot down of the plane is a very murky affair under international law. It is not straightforward at all and the Russians are convinced that the Turks premeditated it, that it was not spontaneous thing defending the borders etc but that they have planned to shoot down the Russian plane in order to make a political statement and indeed even if you take the Turkish point of view, that Russian plane could only have spent about 17 seconds inside Turkish territory which is not enough time to ask for orders and get orders back and break out the live ammunition and start shooting.

So it probably was pre-planned and this throws not just the Turkish-Russian relationship into crisis but it really deeply complicates things on the ground in Syria and so I think that we need to watch this really carefully because more bad things are likely to happen.  

Press TV: And I want to ask you in fact about Syria itself, because obviously all of this goes back to the disagreement over the policies towards Syria on the part of Turkey/NATO and of course Russia which says it is fighting against militants and terrorists in that country. How do you feel this will play out regarding that?

Weir: Well here we have the problem that everybody hates the Islamic State (Daesh) and everybody - you, me, my Russian family - everybody has a passport in their pocket from a country that is presently pounding, has warplanes over there or soldiers pounding the Islamic State. We all agree about that.

The problem here is that various countries do not agree about Assad and the Syrian regime and this is where all of these complications are appearing and this is the root cause of this incident we are seeing going up between Russia and Turkey because they have diametrically opposed agendas about what should happen there, whether Assad should stay or Assad should go and this is the source of great discord.  

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