Putin refuses Erdogan meet unless apology given

Russian President Vladimir Putin has refused to contact Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan because Ankara does not want to apologize for the downing of a Russian warplane, Yuri Ushakov, Putin's aide, said on Friday. "We see Turkey's unwillingness to simply apologize for the incident with the plane," Ushakov said in response to why Putin has refused to talk with Erdogan, Reuters reported. Ushakov said the Kremlin had received a request from Ankara regarding a possible meeting between the two leaders at a climate conference in Paris on November 30. In Paris, Putin will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the Syrian crisis and Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He will also meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel for talks about Syria and Ukraine, Ushakov said. Russia ordered sweeping retaliatory measures after Turkish fighter jets shot down the warplane on Tuesday, threatening ties between two rival players in the Syrian war and raising fears of a wider international conflict. Paris proposal After a series of furious tit-for-tat recriminations, Erdogan said on Friday he wanted to meet Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the climate summit in Paris, AFP reported on Friday. "I would like to meet him face to face on Monday," Erdogan said. But he said Ankara did not deliberately down the plane and dismissed Putin's criticism of the incident as "unacceptable." Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Friday sought to ease tensions with Moscow over the Russian warplane issue over Syria, and said the world must unite to defeat the Islamic State group. Ankara has also "temporarily" suspended air strikes against IS targets in Syria in order to avoid any further such confrontations, Turkey's Hurriyet newspaper said. Turkey says the plane strayed into its airspace and ignored repeated warnings but Russia, which has been waging air strikes in Syria since September, insisted it did not cross the border. "While the measures to defend our territory will remain in place, Turkey will work with Russia and our allies to calm tensions," Davutoglu wrote in Friday's edition of The Times in London. "The downing of an unidentified jet in Turkish airspace was not - and is not - an act against a specific country," he said. Response possible However, Russia's lower house speaker Sergei Naryshkin said on Friday that Russia has the right to make a military response after the downing of a Russian jet earlier this week by NATO member Turkey. Speaking in an interview with Romanian television station Digi24, Naryshkin said that "This is intentional murder of our soldiers and this deed must be punished." "We know those who did this and they must be judged. At the same time, the response from the Russian side will surely follow, in line with international law. And aside from this, Russia has also the right to military response," added Naryskin, who was attending a meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation in Bucharest. He said Moscow had allocated additional military resources on Thursday to boost the security of Russian fighter jets. Russia and Turkey are on opposite sides in the Syrian conflict, with Ankara backing rebels fighting to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad while Moscow is one of his last remaining allies. The downing of the plane has highlighted the difficulty of forging consensus on Syria but Davutoglu said the world should unite against a "common enemy." "The international community must not turn on itself. Otherwise the only victors will be Daesh ... and the Syrian regime," he said, using an Arabic term for IS jihadists. But the Kremlin said Friday that Western powers were not ready to form a coalition with Russia to fight the IS group.