Putin-Erdogan Agreement Falls Apart as Russians Realize That Arming the Turks is Insane

Just three and a half years ago, on January 20, 2016, the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan had good reason to congratulate himself. He had successfully arranged a scheme of payoffs for two men who were intimate advisors to the presidents of the United States and Russia — at the very same time. They were Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor to Donald Trump; and Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Vladimir Putin.

No one had pulled off the simultaneity before; but it was short-lived. Flynn was forced to resign after just 24 days in office and charged with lying to the FBI. He subsequently pleaded guilty and is now facing a prison sentence. Investigation of his lucratively paid lobbying for Turkey is still under way.

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Peskov remains in his Kremlin office, as he has for the past seven years. However, the Defence Ministry led by Sergei Shoigu and the General Staff headed by General Valery Gerasimov, have rebelled against Peskov’s line with Putin, ending for all practical purposes the terms of agreement Putin and Erdogan signed last September for a Turkish protectorate of Idlib governorate in northwestern  Syria. 

History is repeating itself. A newly published book, The Thirty-Year Genocide, Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, is the most detailed record to date of the policies of the Ottoman sultanate and its successor, the nationalist government led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, to destroy the entire populations living on Turkish territory of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. The 650-page work explains region by region, year by year, what the Turkish methods of ethnic cleansing were, and why. “The Armenians were the main victims of Turkish atrocity,” the authors, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, write, “in terms of the numbers slaughtered in 1894-96 and 1915-1916. Certainly, the Turks appear to have hated them the most.”