Turkey plays the role of an alpha dog hounded on the Russian bear, Arman Melikyan, political analyst, ex-foreign minister of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, says in an interview with ArmInfo.
"It would be wrong to consider the Russian-Turkish conflict in the context of their bilateral relations and regional interests. The conflict is undoubtedly due to specific peculiarities and larger geopolitical processes," the analyst says.
Melikyan considers the common factors driving such a large-scale geopolitics to be a basis for assessing the Russian-Turkish conflict as long-term. He thinks the conflict has serious prerequisites to deepen and extend and it will reach its peak within the next 2-3 years. It is impossible to forecast how long the conflict will last. Nevertheless, the analyst thinks that the tension between Moscow and Ankara is unlikely to develop into large-scale armed clashes. Moscow's relations with Ankara deteriorated after a Russian Su-24 aircraft was downed on November 24 by a missile fired from a Turkish F-16 fighter over Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin described the downing as a "stab in the back" performed by the "accomplices of terrorists."