The most difficult moments during the tenure of the Turkish foreign minister were the settlement of the crisis in relations with Moscow after a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Russian plane in Syria, as well as the murder of Russian Ambassador to Ankara Andrei Karlov, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in an interview with Hürriyet newspaper, Report informs.
“When I took office in 2015, the first person I had to call was Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov after the plane was shot down. It was a very serious crisis. It took 8 months to restore relations. One of the events that upset me the most, is when I received the news of the killing of the Russian Ambassador Karlov just at the moment when we were about to land in Moscow,” he said.
Cavusoglu added that the Russian side knew that the Turkish authorities had nothing to do with it, the FETÖ employee did it.
As many as 28 suspects were charged with organizing the assassination of the ambassador, including Fethullah Gülen, a religious figure living in the US, who denied them. Five defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, eight people received from three years and nine months to 15 years in prison, and six more were acquitted. The cases of nine more wanted defendants, including Gülen, were divided into separate proceedings at the request of the prosecutor’s office.