NATO rejects Russia explanation on Turkish airspace

Nato on Tuesday rejected Moscow’s explanation that its warplanes violated the airspace of alliance member Turkey at the weekend by mistake and said Russia was sending more ground troops to Syria.

With Russia extending its air strikes to include the ancient city of Palmyra, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he was losing patience with Russian violations of his country’s airspace. “An attack on Turkey means an attack on Nato,” Erdogan warned at a Brussels news conference.

Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance had reports of a substantial Russian military build-up in Syria, including ground troops and ships in the eastern Mediterranean.

“I will not speculate on the motives ... but this does not look like an accident and we have seen two of them,” Stoltenberg said of the air incursions over Turkey’s border with Syria. He noted that they “lasted for a long time”.

The incidents, which Nato has described as “extremely dangerous” and “unacceptable”, underscore the risks of a further escalation of the Syrian civil war, as Russian and US warplanes fly combat missions over the same country for the first time since World War II.

Stoltenberg declined to comment on whether the Russian planes had locked their radar on the F-16 Turkish jets scrambled on Saturday to remove Russian aircraft from the airspace, usually a prelude to firing.Separately, a US official told Reuters the incursions lasted more than a few seconds and described Moscow’s assertion that the incursions were an accident as “far-fetched”.

Stoltenberg said the US-led alliance had not received “any real explanation” from Russia about the incursions. He had not had any direct contact with Moscow but Nato has discussed the possibility of using military lines of communication with Russia. Russia’s Nato envoy said the alliance was using the accidental incursion to distort the aims of Moscow’s air campaign in Syria, according to the TASS news agency. “The impression is that the incident in Turkish airspace was used to plug Nato as an organisation into the information campaign waged by the West to distort the aims of the operations carried out by the Russian air force in Syria,” Alexander Grushko was quoted as telling reporters in Brussels.

The United States, leading the coalition attacking Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, wants to avoid being drawn into a proxy war with Russia, which is defending its ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he would not put ground forces in Syria, where the civil war has killed 250,000 people. However, Stoltenberg said there was a large presence of Russian forces in Syria.

“I can confirm that we have seen a substantial build-up of Russian forces in Syria: air forces, air defences, but also ground troops in connection with the air base they have, and we also see an increased naval presence,” Stoltenberg said.