With relations dithering between Russia and Turkey after the downing of a Russian jet that violated Turkish airspace last week, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu attended the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to address the recent situation with Russia.
Along with him, NATO allies are expected to look to strengthen Turkey's defense along its Syrian border after the United States withdrew its missile defense battery for modernization, leaving Ankara exposed, as Russia intensifies actions in the area, such as moving its S-400 long-range missile system. Previously, Germany had removed its Patriot battery supporting Turkish air defense on the frontier, leaving Spain as the lone NATO ally with Patriots there, and raising strategy questions at a time when Ankara says it faces Russian airspace violations.
NATO deployed its Patriot missiles along the border in January 2013 to shoot down any missiles fired into Turkish territory from Syria's conflict zone. Ankara had appealed to the alliance to maintain the defense even before the flare-up of tensions with Russia over airspace violations. "We need to support Turkey," Canada's Foreign Minister Stephane Dion said on his arrival in Brussels for meetings with his NATO peers, as offers of ships and aircraft began to trickle in from allies. It is expected that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will also push for other NATO members to do more to protect Turkey as well as to step up actions in the U.S.-led coalition against DAESH militants in Syria, a senior State Department official said. "We have a number of allies who are considering increasing their effort to support Turkish sovereignty and security, but also looking at operations in Syria, adding to what the French have been doing over recent weeks," the official told reporters.
"The secretary will make the case that we need even more." Looking to engage with Russia to defeat DAESH, NATO's Jens Stoltenberg said strengthening Turkish air defense was not a knee-jerk reaction to the Nov. 24 downed jet incident. "We decided to address the need to support Turkey before the incident last week," he said. "The focus now should be on how we can de-escalate and how we can calm tensions."While the Turkish air force has shown it is capable of intercepting Russian jets on bombing raids in Syria that stray into Turkish airspace, diplomats say sending military support to
Turkey is also designed to reassure Ankara and calm tensions.
So far, the United States has moved jets to the Turkish NATO air base Incirlik, while Britain has said it will also send jets to the region. Germany and Denmark are sending ships to the NATO fleet in the eastern Mediterranean.
