Putin, Erdogan meet to rebuild relations

ST PETERSBURG: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that restoring trade ties with Turkey will take time and work, after his first meeting with counterpart

ST PETERSBURG: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that restoring trade ties with Turkey will take time and work, after his first meeting with counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan since Ankara shot down a Russian warplane last November.

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Putin insisted he wanted to see relations with “our Turkish friends” return to previous levels but stressed it would take time for Moscow to roll back a series of economic sanctions against Ankara.

“Ahead of us lies painstaking work to resuscitate trade and economic cooperation. This process has already started but it will take some time,” Putin told a press conference in Saint Petersburg.

“We lived through a very complicated moment in the relations between our states and we very much want, and I feel our Turkish friends want, to overcome the difficulties,” Putin said.

Erdogan’s visit to Putin’s hometown of Saint Petersburg was his first foreign trip since the failed coup against him last month that sparked a purge of opponents and cast a shadow over Turkey’s relations with the West. For his part, Erdogan said he hoped Russia-Turkish ties would become “more robust” and stressed how important it was that Putin offered his support after the coup.

The Turkish leader also called for the TurkStream gas pipeline, a joint project with Russia, to be “done as soon as possible”.

The shooting down of a Russian fighter jet by a Turkish F-16 plane over the Syrian border last autumn saw a furious Putin slap economic sanctions on Turkey. But in late June, Putin accepted a letter expressing regret over the incident from Erdogan as an apology and quickly rolled back a ban on the sale of package holidays to Turkey and signalled Moscow would end measures against Turkish food imports and construction firms.