John Hayward

Another sign of growing tensions between Russia and Turkey was Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s announcement on Friday that visa-free travel between the two countries would end on January 1.

To support its insistence that Russia’s Su-24 warplane was warned multiple times about its proximity to Turkish airspace before Turkish F-16s shot it down, Ankara has released audio recordings of the warning messages. On Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed those recordings as forgeries.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, struck a confrontational note in a Thanksgiving Day interview with CNN, refusing to apologize for his forces shooting down a Russian warplane along the Syrian border this week. In fact, Erdogan said Turkey would take the same actions again, under similar circumstances.

One of the comforting thoughts for observers of the escalating conflict between Russia and Turkey is that both have solid economic incentives to avoid escalating too much. This was emphasized by a 4.39 percent drop in the Turkish stock market, accompanied by the highest five-year debt insurance costs in several weeks, and the Turkish lira sliding 0.6 percent against the dollar.

Following the downing of a Russian jet near the Syrian-Turkish border, the Turkish military has released audio recordings of the warnings it claims were sent to the Russian plane.

Tuesday was filled with conflicting news about the fate of the Russian pilots shot down by Turkish forces over Syria. At various points during the day, it was said that both had been killed – possibly riddled with bullets by Syrian rebels as they came down in their parachutes – and that both were alive, and in enemy hands.

As tensions build between Turkey and Russia following the destruction of a Russian warplane by Turkish F-16s Tuesday morning, Russian state outlet RT.com reports that a missile cruiser has been deployed off the Syrian coast, with orders to “destroy any target posing danger.”

According to a report published in the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Rai, and related by the Jerusalem Post, Russian ground troops are already deployed in considerable force across Syria.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a press conference on the downing of a Russian warplane near the Turkish border, in which he seemed to dismiss earlier Russian theories that their plane could have been hit by ground artillery fire from Syrian rebels.

On Tuesday morning, two Turkish F-16 fighters engaged a Russian Sukhoi-24 warplane and shot it down with an air-to-air missile, somewhere north of the Syrian port city of Latakia.