Russian President Vladimir Putin once again snubbed a meeting with Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his entire entourage by making them wait outside his room until he couldn’t stand anymore.
Visibly exhausted Erdogan, then sat on a chair placed for butlers. The video of his waiting outside Putin’s room has gone viral. The most striking humiliation of the Turkish guests appeared in the choreography of the meeting. The Turkish delegation was made to stand near an imposing statue of Catherine the Great, the Russian empress who annexed Crimea from Ottoman Turkey in 1783 and defeated the Ottomans several times in the Russo-Turkish wars in 1768-74 and 1787-1792. To add insult to injury, Erdogan was seated next to Putin under a bronze sculpture of Russian soldiers of the fateful Russian-Turkish War that ended in Ottoman Turkey’s defeat in 1878, reports a website.
This is not the first time that Putin snubbed Erdogan. In 2015, Putin humiliated his Turkish counterpart in France as the body of a pilot killed when Ankara downed one of Moscow’s warplanes returned home. Then Moscow had imposed its sanctions aimed at exacting economic revenge on Ankara.
Putin and Erdogan have been locked in a furious war of words since the incident and the Kremlin strongman rejected the Turkish leader’s offer of face-to-face talks on the sidelines of a climate summit outside the French capital.
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