What a foolish thing for Turkey to do. You can escort foreign planes out of your airspace. You can pull up next to them and fire your guns. Shooting them down and killing a Russian pilot?
Foolish.
I have no great love for Putin. He’s a tinhorn dictator.
But he’s a tinhorn dictator with nuclear weapons.
What a foolish, foolish thing to do.
I would suspect that some of their motivation has to do with a set of wacky Islamic apocalyptic beliefs about Turkey, the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate.
“What a foolish thing for Turkey to do. You can escort foreign planes out of your airspace. You can pull up next to them and fire your guns. Shooting them down and killing a Russian pilot?”
What is foolish is your sophomoric ideas about the rules of engagement. As I have said so many times before, the news reports have said the Russian warplanes have been turning of their transponders to hide their identities, used their weapons’ radar systems to lock-on the Turkish air defense fighter while they were far inside Turkey, and generally threatened to shoot down the Turkish air defense fighters far inside Turkey. You would have to be some kind of congenital idiot to think that air defense fighters who have been threatened like this by the Russian warplanes are going to risk being shot down by trying to approach such hostile aircraft who are refusing to identify themselves as they are conducting combat operations. The Russians were warned to identify themselves, comply with the standard international rules of engagement, not to threaten Turkish air defense fighters, and not to violate Turkish airspace. The Russians refused to comply with international law and suffered the appropriate consequences.
It is also foolish for you to pretend Russia is the innocent victim in this incident. Putin is using the Russian presence in Syria as an excuse to intimidate Saudi Arabia and to attempt efforts to divide and thereby weaken NATO in advance of Russia’s upcoming resumed offensive operations in the Ukraine.