Russian officials said on Thursday (26 November) that they are breaking all cultural ties with Turkey following the shooting down of a Russian Su-24 fighter jet that was accused of veering into Turkish airspace while on a mission in neighbouring Syria on 24 November.
In the latest example of culture falling prey to geopolitics, Russia’s top culture officials said it was impossible to have any relations with Turkey under the current circumstances.
Russia’s culture ministry told the Ria Novosti news agency that talks had been held last March on Russia and Turkey hosting bilateral cultural and tourism years in 2017 and 2018.
All plans are now off, the culture minister Vladimir Medinsky told the news agency.
“The Turks are making offers, we didn’t come to any agreements, and now we won’t,” he said.
Mikhail Shvydkoy, Russia’s presidential envoy for international cultural cooperation, who served as culture minister from 2000 to 2004, was even more categorical in comments to the Interfax news agency.
“Large-scale events in the cultural sphere that are carried out with political support such as the bilateral cultural year with Turkey are impossible in the immediate future,” he said.
On Tuesday (24 November), President Vladimir Putin called the downing of the plane “a stab in the back delivered to us by accomplices of terrorists.”
The Russian government was furious on Thursday after the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told CNN in an interview that Turkey would not apologise for downing the plane. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev gave government ministers two days to prepare a package of economic and diplomatic measures against Turkey. Russia’s defense ministry has already broken all ties with the Turkish military and severe economic sanctions are anticipated.
“We had various kinds of projects, cultural ones, interesting ones, but after the step taken by the leadership of Turkey, which does not wish to make the necessary apologies, it is senseless to speak of the future of these projects,” Shvydkoy said.