View of Yalta and the Black Sea from Mount Ai-Petri. Archival photoANKARA, Apr 3 The answer to the question about Crimea's ownership is clear and precise, it's the same as asking a Turk whose Hatay, Russian Ambassador to Turkey Alexei Yerkhov wrote in an article for the Aydınlık newspaper. “One Ukrainian TV journalist was very fond of starting interviews with Russian public and state figures with the question “whose Crimea?” A very “conflictogenic” statement of the question, immediately leads either to a quarrel or to a political statement that the interviewer needs. Indeed, whose Crimea? And whose Jerusalem «And if you stop now some Turk on the streets of Ankara or Istanbul and ask him, whose is Hatay? The answer will be unequivocal, and it's good, if not with a «Janissary slap in the face.» So it is in Russia — if you ask a Russian, whose Crimea — the answer will be clear and precise. Of course, we had some people who doubted the Russian ownership of the peninsula, but most of them have now left somewhere. It seems, they say, to England, «Yerkhov wrote. Hatay is a region in southern Turkey , sovereignty which Syria did not recognize over this territory for a long time. Hatay became an administrative-territorial unit of Turkey in 1939 after a referendum, but Damascus did not recognize the legality of voting until the early 2000s. Official Ankara has repeatedly stated that it does not recognize the reunification of Crimea with Russia. During his speech at the opening of the Diplomatic Forum in Antalya, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that if the world had properly reacted to the events in Crimea in 2014, there would not be a difficult situation in Ukraine now.
Ambassador to Turkey Yerkhov: Russia was ignored in matters of national security
