Chicago police superintendent fired by mayor amid outcry over video of shooting

The head of the Chicago Police Department has been fired amid widespread criticism over how authorities responded to the fatal shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer last year.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said he formally asked Garry F. McCarthy, the Chicago police superintendent, for his resignation on Tuesday morning, a week after video footage of the shooting was released and the officer was charged with murder.

“He has become an issue, rather than dealing with the issue, and a distraction,” Emanuel said. He added that while he is loyal to McCarthy, whom he praised for his leadership of the department, the needs of the city are more important.

Anger has erupted in Chicago since authorities released footage of Jason Van Dyke, a city police officer, shooting Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old, last year.

Emanuel said he began talking to McCarthy on Sunday, after several days of heated protests, about “the undeniable fact that the public trust in the leadership of the department has been shaken and eroded.”

When Emanuel announced McCarthy’s appointment in May 2011, he praised him as someone who proved “reducing crime and working closely with the community are not conflicting goals.”

McCarthy has spent more than three decades in law enforcement. Before coming to Chicago, he served as the police director in Newark and was an officer and deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department.

The same month his appointment in Chicago was announced, the Justice Department launched an investigation into the Newark police force. That review looked at reports of how officers used force and how complaints of excessive force that occurred before and after McCarthy took over the Chicago police force. The Justice Department said last year it had found “patterns of misconduct” in Newark, releasing a report that did not mention McCarthy, and reached an agreement with the city to have its force overseen by an independent monitor.

While Emanuel said he had “a lot of confidence in the work” McCarthy has done, he said the move was necessary to rebuild public trust and confidence in the police force.

City leaders and demonstrators have called for Emanuel to remove McCarthy, arguing that new leadership is needed to reassure a troubled public. Last week, a dozen members of the city council’s black caucus gathered to reiterate these calls for new leadership.

Emanuel’s decision to dismiss McCarthy also comes as there is growing public anxiety over a rise in violent crime in Chicago and other big cities across the country. Chicago has seen more than 2,700 shootings so far this year, topping the total for all of last year, and more than 430 of them have been fatal.

During an October meeting of more than 100 of the country’s top law enforcement officers and politicians in Washington, Emanuel said his police department has turned “fetal” due to the increased focus on how police use deadly force and demonstrations that have occurred after high-profile deaths at the hands of police. He also said this prompted officers to pull back from policing. That drew a rebuke for him back home, as the head of the police union argued that officers are not backing down.”

More recently, though, outrage has mounted over the long lag between McDonald’s death in October 2014 and last week’s release of the video and charges against Van Dyke. In the interim, Emanuel was reelected to a second term after an unexpected runoff.

Since the video’s release, Emanuel has said he fully supported McCarthy, a position he held publicly until word leaked shortly before the news conference that he had asked him to step down.

McCarthy acknowledged missteps, saying in an interview with NBC Chicago that the initial press release about the shooting, which said McDonald had continued to approach officers and disregarded orders to drop his knife, “was mistaken.”

In addition, a spokesman for the police union had said that McDonald lunged at police with a knife. Last week, that spokesman said he was relaying information told to him by other people on the scene and said he never spoke with Van Dyke.

But he said his authority in the Van Dyke case was limited as an outside agency and federal officials investigated what happened.

“The things that I have authority over are training, policy and supervision,” he said.

McCarthy also defended how the city has responded to the protests that have erupted since the shooting video was released last week, praising “incredible restraint by officers.”

However, calls for McCarthy’s ouster have continued in the days since the video was released. On Tuesday, the Chicago Sun-Times released an editorial saying McCarthy “has lost the trust and support of much of Chicago.”

In addition to announcing that McCarthy would step down, Emanuel also said he had created a task force focused on police accountability that was intended to improve independent oversight of the police and the way authorities respond to police officers who receive multiple complaints. The task force is also meant to determine if the city should change its policy of not releasing footage of police shootings.

This group’s recommendations will be presented to Emanuel and the Chicago City Council at the end of March, he said.

Japan resumes Antarctic whale hunt

After a judgment by an international court pressured Japan to stop hunting whales in Antarctica for a year, the country is scheduled to send whaling ships there again on Tuesday — resuming its position as the only country whaling in the icy Southern Ocean, according to the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Japan plans to kill 333 minke whales each year for 12 years, a third of the number of whales it previously killed annually in Antarctica, in what government officials insist is a scientific research venture, not a commercial meat operation.

Large-scale whaling in Japan began after World War II, when meat was scarce, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, a U.K.-based nonprofit. The Japanese government heavily subsidizes the industry, although, the organization says, demand for whale meat has fallen significantly over the past few decades.

Japan is not the only country with an active interest in whaling. Although an international moratorium on whaling was put into effect in 1986, Iceland and Norway continue commercial whaling. Whale hunting for research is regarded as separate from commercial whaling and is unaffected by the moratorium.

Patrick Ramage, the whale program director at International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, said minke whales were historically considered too small to be commercially viable for whalers. Many countries have “worked their way down from the blue whale through the fin whale, humpback whale and other species. It’s now the little guy — minke whale — that Japan is targeting.”

Australia took Japan to the United Nations International Court of Justice in The Hague over its Antarctic whaling activities. Last year the court ruled in favor of Australia and ordered Japan to halt its special permit program in the Antarctic, known as JARPA II. The court, which found that Japan was using its scientific research program to disguise commercial whaling, said that JARPA II involved the killing of 3,600 minke whales over several years and that “the scientific output to date appears limited.”

Japan halted its whaling operations in Antarctica because of the court's decision. But rather than let its Antarctic whaling operation fade away, Japan has apparently reinvented it with a program called the New Scientific Whale Research Program in the Antarctic Ocean (PDF), which it plans to launch on Tuesday.

An IWC spokeswoman said that when the commission’s scientific committee reviewed Japan’s newly named plan, “they didn’t agree whether the research Japan was proposing required lethal research or whether you could do it using nonlethal methods, for example, DNA.”

But anti-whaling activists say Japan is merely using the name change to continue whale hunting.

“In the absence of an agreed [minke whale] population estimate and with serious questions, both legal and scientific … Japan’s bureaucrats are nonetheless proceeding in returning to slaughter in the name of science in Antarctic waters this coming season,” said Ramage.

As populations of fish and other marine food sources decline worldwide because of overharvesting, various nations have increasingly looked southward to Antarctica’s less exploited and relatively plentiful waters. Although many countries consider the Southern Ocean a conservation area, others see it as a wide-open food resource.

A few weeks ago, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources — a commission of 25 countries established to conserve Antarctic marine life — failed to reach an agreement about establishing marine protected areas in Antarctic waters after Russia refused to sign on to the measure.

“The minke whale population that is being hunted is considered to be sustainable,” said the IWC representative. “But obviously, it comes down to the numbers being hunted.”

Turkey won’t apologize to Russia over warplane downing

BRUSSELS – Turkey won’t apologize to Russia for shooting down a warplane operating over Syria, the Turkish prime minister said Monday, stressing that the Turkish military was doing its job defending the country’s airspace.

Ahmet Davutoglu also said Turkey hopes Moscow will reconsider economic sanctions announced against Turkish interests in the wake of last week’s incident. The Turkish resort town of Antalya is “like a second home” to many Russian holidaymakers, he said, but refused to yield on Turkish security.

“No Turkish prime minister or president will apologize … because of doing our duty,” Davutoglu told reporters after meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels.

“Protection of Turkish airspace, Turkish borders is a national duty, and our army did their job to protect this airspace. But if the Russian side wants to talk, and wants to prevent any future unintentional events like this, we are ready to talk.”

Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian warplane on Nov. 24, sparking new Cold War-style tensions between NATO, of which Turkey is a member, and Russia. One of the Russian pilots later died, while a second was rescued.

In recent years, NATO has had both tensions and co-operation with Russia over issues ranging from Afghanistan and Ukraine to Syria and beyond.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told The Associated Press on Sunday that he’s concerned about the Turkey-Russia tensions.

On Monday, the body of Lt. Col. Oleg Peshkov, the Russian pilot who was killed, was flown back to Russia following a military ceremony in the Turkish capital, Ankara, Turkey’s military said.

Russia began airstrikes in Syria on Sept. 30 that it says are focused on fighters of the Islamic State group, but which some observers say target other rebel groups and are aimed at bolstering the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Russia insists that the plane that was shot down didn’t intrude on Turkish airspace.

Davutoglu insisted a violation occurred, and said Turkey had repeatedly warned Russia about incursions into its airspace.

“We also made very clear that the Turkish-Syria border is a national security issue for Turkey. So it was a defensive action,” Davutoglu said. He repeated Turkish assertions that there were no IS fighters in the area.

“We have been telling our Russian friends that their bombardments against civilians on our border is creating new waves of refugees which do not go to Russia or to any other country — but coming to Turkey,” he said.

“And Turkey, after every bombardment, (is) receiving more and more — tens of thousands of refugees from Syria,” Davutoglu added. “Turkey is a country paying the price of this crisis.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday called for sanctions against Turkey including bans on some Turkish goods and extensions on work contracts for Turks working in Russia. The measures also call for ending chartered flights from Russia to Turkey and for Russian tourism companies to stop selling vacation packages that would include a stay in Turkey.

Brains aren’t actually ‘male’ or ‘female,’ new study suggests

Lots of folks -- well-intentioned and otherwise -- like to point out the supposed differences between male and female brains. But it's time to throw away the brain gender binary, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Brains can't really fit into the categories of "male" or "female" -- their distinguishing features actually vary across a spectrum.

It's exciting news for anyone who studies the brain -- or gender. And it's a step towards validating the experiences of those who live outside the gender binary.

"Whereas a categorical difference in the genitals has always been acknowledged, the question of how far these categories extend into human biology is still not resolved," the authors write in the study. Structural differences in the brain -- and differences in behavior -- are often taken as evidence that brains can be distinctly male or female. For this to be true, the authors write, the differences would have to be consistent: Those who were biologically male would have to almost always have "male" features and not female ones in their brain.

But in analyzing the MRI scans of some 1,400 individuals, researchers led by University of Tel-Aviv's Daphna Joel found that mash-ups were more common. They believe their study is the first to look for brain differences between genders by using the brain as a whole, instead of pointing out individual structures and features (like size, amount of gray versus white matter, and so on) in isolation.

“Nobody has had a way of quantifying this before,” Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Chicago Medical School in Illinois who was not involved in the study, told Science Magazine. “Everything they’ve done here is new.”

The authors found that only a very small number of the brains studied had features that were entirely male, female, or intermediate between the two. The vast majority had a mosaic.

"[B]rains with features that are consistently at one end of the “maleness-femaleness” continuum are rare," the scientists wrote in the study. "Rather, most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males."

Rockefeller University's Bruce McEwen, who edited the manuscript of the study but didn't participate in the research, told New Scientist that the findings would likely surprise some scientists. “We are beginning to realize the complexity of what we have traditionally understood to be ‘male’ and ‘female’, and this study is the first step in that direction,” he said. “I think it will change peoples’ minds.”

Lead author Daphna Joel hopes that the study will help do away with assumptions made about gender differences. “We separate girls and boys, men and women all the time,” she told New Scientist. “It’s wrong, not just politically, but scientifically – everyone is different.”

Climate change threatens to wash away cultural history

The seaport of Annapolis, Maryland, had seen floods before. But many residents were unprepared for the deluge of stormwater that gushed into the streets in mid-September 12 years ago when Hurricane Isabel struck the coast. Water rose through the drain system at the U.S. Naval Academy and swamped campus buildings, including some of the ornate, century-old halls. Downshore, in the Annapolis historic district, where some of the houses and buildings predate the American Revolution, the water spilled over windowsills.

Michael Dowling, a local architect, strolled from his house down to the dock to witness the calamity. “It was surreal to see buildings all around the City Dock poking up out of the water,” he remembered. Dozens of buildings were damaged. At a historic theater, moisture seeped into the 19th century bricks, eating away at the lime mortar. It took about seven years to repair the masonry.

The last storm to pummel the region this badly was in 1933. But if climate change piles extra feet of water onto storm surges and swollen tides, damage to the city’s historic sites could become more common — and costly. Dowling estimates that one fierce storm could wreak $320 million worth of damage in the historic district. Even smaller floods could wear away at both the city’s historic sites and its tourism economy. As sea levels rise as a result of global warming, nuisance floods have become almost routine in the city, Maryland’s capital. The Union of Concerned Scientists predicts that in 30 years, Annapolis could be flooded roughly every day.

The city’s historic preservationists are on the leading edge of a push to determine how to protect landmarks in the face of climate change. For people who have spent their lives dealing with the past, climate change is an awkward fight: It requires planning for an unprecedented future. It is partly an engineering problem. Dowling, for example, has worked with the theater to test what materials and techniques could be used to protect old wood framing and masonry. But climate change also poses a threat to the entire project of studying and recording history. Effects such as sea level rise, wildfires and more intense storms and disasters will ultimately destroy some cherished bits of history and culture and damage others beyond recognition. Accepting so many losses runs counter to the basic mission of historic preservation. Part of the goal now is to make sure that climate change doesn’t leave societies with a broken or impoverished sense of history and cultural heritage. This week at the United Nations negotiations in Paris, historic preservationists from around the world are holding their own discussions and side events about how to accomplish this.

‘We have to accept that we’re going to lose places. What, in the event of a disaster, are we going to let go of?’

Lisa Craig 

chief of historic preservation, Annapolis

David Luchsinger, the superintendent of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, at the back door of his home, damaged by Superstorm Sandy, on Liberty Island in New York in 2012. 

Richard Drew / AP

Two years ago, Lisa Craig, the chief of historic preservation for Annapolis, began leading a series of public discussions to help the city figure out how to protect its historic properties in the face of sea level rise and flooding. The city contracted Dowling to analyze architectural and engineering solutions and has partnered with the Naval Academy. In October last year, the city was named a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It became clear that whatever Annapolis did would be part of a national story.

Across the country, there are thousands of traces of history — from ancient archaeological sites to lofty estates, monuments, libraries and military buildings — that weren’t made to weather the weird and unpredictable climate of the 21st century. Some are such iconic and treasured parts of national identity or such boons to the tourism economy that it may be easy to justify doling out millions of dollars to keep them intact. (The National Park Service dedicated about $300 million to rebuild mid-Atlantic parks after Superstorm Sandy; most of that money has been spent on the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and other public spaces in and around New York Harbor.) But even some of the most famous landmarks might be tough to protect.

It may not be practical to move or lift the foundations of the thick-walled, granite edifices of the Naval Academy — even if they were hallowed by such national figures as former President Jimmy Carter and Sen. John McCain. And what of smaller places — buildings and barns, rowhouses and cobblestone paths and the encyclopedic information buried in the fossilized footprints and relics of archaeological sites?

“We have to accept that we’re going to lose places. What, in the event of a disaster, are we going to let go of?” said Craig.

In places like New York Harbor, where resources are more ample, it has been perhaps easier to decide what to let go of and what not to — and to document historic evidence before it disappears. After Superstorm Sandy, the National Park Service decided to dismantle all the housing on Liberty Island, even the brick house that had been home to the park superintendent. The agency is also disassembling some buildings near the Sandy Hook Lighthouse in New Jersey and the old Army artillery post at Fort Tilden in New York. These were “not of extreme significance,” according to Tim Hudson, an agency engineer who has managed the recovery from Sandy. But in every loss, there’s a potential lesson, and all the buildings are carefully photographed and documented before their removal.

Smoke from Las Conchas fire in Los Alamos Canyon in New Mexico in 2011. The blaze scorched more than 156,000 acres, including Valles Caldera National Preserve to the west. 

© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

The National Park Service is the lead federal agency keeping watch over many of the landmarks that form America’s legacy, from Liberty Island to the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in the Arctic, where the first humans may have set foot in North America. It maintains the National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmarks Program and sets policy on historic preservation that trickles down to state agencies. The agency also manages roughly 400 parks, monuments and other sites, all on a budget that has been cut by more than 20 percent over the last decade (though Barack Obama’s administration has proposed a budget increase for 2016). Dealing with climate change — including floodproofing and firefighting — ratchets up the cost of everything, and historic preservationists say they are already making tough choices about what to prioritize.

The effects of climate change have struck some places so suddenly that it has been hard to capture the information held in landmarks and artifacts before they are erased. In 2011, Las Conchas fire, which was then the largest and most ravenous wildfire New Mexico had seen in recorded history, raced across the Jemez Mountains at a pace of nearly an acre per second and into canyons and slopes full of archaeological sites. “As someone who thought I knew what the worst-case scenario would be, the Las Conchas Fire was something beyond that and something I had never imagined before,” said Anastasia Steffen, a Park Service archaeologist. In the wake of the fire, she trekked through the scorched pine and fir forests on the slopes of Cerro del Medio, one of several ancient domes that ring the volcanic crater in Valles Caldera National Monument. “The ground was completely black, and then all across there were all of the black obsidian artifacts exposed,” she recalled.

Obsidian is a naturally occurring glass that can form in a volcano. Acres of land around the crater of Valles Caldera are covered with projectile points and cutting tools made from the glistening rock over the past 10,000 years. In the weeks that followed the fire, rains and then flash floods rushed across the mountains, licking away the ash, eating the bare topsoil and eventually carrying the obsidian downhill. “When the rains kept coming, the archaeological sites themselves were being washed away,” said Steffen. “All the other information that would have told you about that time period when people were there and all the artifacts became jumbled downhill or downstream.”

The Park Service’s mission is to preserve “unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System,” but climate change is making that impossible in some locations. Many historic preservationists say that in some cases, the only thing to do now is to try to catalog what remains. Marcy Rockman, who works (with the bulky job title climate change adaptation coordinator for cultural resources) in the National Park Service’s Washington, D.C., office, thinks global warming adds to the importance of recording the signs of the past. History and archaeology, she said, “helps us turn a mirror on ourselves and helps us come up with actual examples of what we mean by what is a sustainable society.”

But there’s little to be done if a place disappears before anyone can figure out what it had to offer. After a 2013 fire left all but two-fifths of Valles Caldera unscorched, “the choice we had to make here at the preserve was to focus our archaeologists on areas that hadn’t burned yet,” said Steffen.

In February, preservationists drafted and signed a manifesto, the Pocantico Call to Action on Climate Impacts and Cultural Heritage, which some in the field regard as a watershed moment. 

In February, Craig and Rockman joined about two dozen of the country’s leading archaeologists and preservationists at the Pocantico Center, on what had been the estate of oil magnate John D. Rockfeller in Tarrytown, New York. There they drafted and signed a manifesto, the Pocantico Call to Action on Climate Impacts and Cultural Heritage, which some in the preservation field regard as a watershed moment. The group agreed that the forecasters of the future — climate scientists — hadn’t heard enough from the scholars and guardians of the past. The document decried that “neither costs of addressing climate change impacts on cultural heritage nor the knowledge we gain from understanding our cultural heritage [has] been comprehensively addressed in climate policy responses at any level.”

“We have a particular viewpoint. We have information to share that doesn’t come from any other sources,” said Rockman. In the months since Pocantico, ideas from the National Park Service have become part of discussions on world heritage at UNESCO meetings. At the current United Nations negotiations in Paris, side events on historic preservation include a conversation about how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading international body of climate scientists, might better examine questions about the loss of historical and archaeological sites.

Such issues are still so new and the situations so unorthodox to a historic preservationist that it’s often necessary to look far afield for answers. In November the city of Fernandina Beach, on a barrier island off the coast of Florida, helped host a public workshop on protecting cultural heritage in a time of sea level rise. Adrienne Burke, who manages the city’s historic preservation program, walked the group through a 200-year-old cemetery. Three years ago, she began looking for a way to save it from sea level rise. She read about coastal erosion in the United Kingdom, and one of its recommendations was to “recognize you will lose things.” “I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s a real strategy,’” she said.

That’s not what Burke has planned for the place, which holds the remains of veterans from the Revolutionary and Civil wars, but she doesn’t know exactly what she will do. She hasn’t yet found anyone who has tried to save a cemetery from sea level rise. 

Pistorius could return to jail with appeal ruling this week

South Africa's Oscar Pistorius will find out if he will return to jail when the Supreme Court of Appeal announces on Thursday if it will scale up the track star's conviction for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp from manslaughter to murder.

The Paralympic gold medallist was released on parole in October after serving a fifth of his five-year prison term for the "culpable homicide" of Steenkamp, whom he killed by firing four shots through a locked toilet door on Valentine's Day 2013.

Prosecutors said Pistorius, 29, should be convicted of murder and sent back to jail because he knew the person behind the door could be killed when he fired. A murder conviction would result in a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.

"The judgment will be delivered at 09:45 (0745 GMT) on 3 December 2015 at the Supreme Court of Appeal," the court said in a statement on Tuesday.

Pistorius, whose lower legs were amputated when he was a baby, denied during his six-month trial that he deliberately killed Steenkamp, saying he mistook her for an intruder at his home.

High Court Judge Thokozile Masipa ruled last year that the state had failed to prove Pistorius had shown "intent" or "dolus eventualis", a legal concept that centres on a person being held responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their actions.

The state argued at the appeal that Masipa misinterpreted some parts of the law, including "dolus eventualis".

If the court of appeal overturns Masipa's verdict, she will be responsible for passing a new sentence on Pistorius, according to legal experts.

What Putin is really after

The shooting down of the Russian bomber by Turkish F-16s last week has taken the relationship between Moscow and Ankara to its lowest point in the past two decades. All signs indicate that the two countries are not going to back down from the standoff any time soon.

The Turkish decision to attack a Russian jet took many Western countries, and Russia itself, by surprise. However, the Kremlin's response to this unprecedented incident has revealed the intricacies and complexities of Russian foreign policy.

Although Moscow's intervention in Syria has been driven by classic great power politics, the killing of the Russian pilot has brought domestic factors into the equation.

To start with the large picture, Moscow has dramatically increased the level of its military engagement in Syria. It appears that for the first time, Russian special forces are fighting alongside Syrian government forces. This could have been seen as Putin's risky adventure in the Middle East but it goes beyond a leader's personal desires. It only confirms Russia's new proactive foreign policy in the region.

The puzzle of Russian involvement

Some analysts have pointed out the long ties between the militaries of the two countries, Russia's naval base in Tartus, and the selling of Russian weapons to Syria as possible factors explaining Moscow's stubborn support for the Assad regime. While these factors have played a role, they alone do not provide a sufficient answer to the puzzle of Russian involvement in Syria.

Russian foreign policy is back to the Cold War days, when the USSR supported client regimes in Africa, Asia and Latin America for the sake of confronting the United States.

Russian foreign policy is back to the Cold War days when the USSR supported client regimes in Africa, Asia and Latin America for the sake of confronting the United States.

During the 1990s, the Kremlin failed miserably to support the pro-Russian regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. It did not stop NATO from bombing Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and four years later did not prevent a NATO attack against Serbia over the fate of Kosovo.

Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 leaders' summit in Antalya, Turkey on November 16 [Reuters]

This inaction was interpreted as a sign of Russia's decline and encouraged the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia to apply for NATO membership. After all, a great power is judged on its capacity to defend "friends and allies" and Russia did not look like it was able to do it. 

The sending of Russian troops to Syria possibly marks the beginning of a new era of great power rivalry in the Middle East. It is clear that Moscow is prepared to defend the Assad regime at any cost. 

What is at stake in Syria now is Russia's status as a great power, capable of projecting power in the so-called middle abroad (srednee zarubezh'e). That is, the Middle East and the Balkans. 

And, if worse comes to worse, Moscow could always help Assad to establish a Red Alawistan as a safe haven for other minorities such as the Christians and the Shia Muslims. 

Such a statelet could eventually become the equivalent of Somaliland in the Eastern Mediterranean: an island of stability surrounded by a chaotic sea of jihadism. In other words, Russia has returned to the Middle East for good.

Competing visions

In this context, Moscow and Ankara have clashed over their competing visions over Syria. The Turkish government has followed a fundamentally different approach to the Syrian conflict. It has opposed the pro-Russian and pro-Iranian Assad regime, while supporting the Syrian armed opposition.

In addition, Ankara has used the Syrian Turkmen as a proxy army against both government forces and Kurdish rebels. The Kremlin was aware of all this, but it hoped that these different priorities would not affect the thriving bilateral relationship with Turkey. 

Yet the Turkish action against Russia has game-changing potential. And this is where domestic politics comes in. Putin has invested considerable financial resources in Russia's military modernisation programme. 

The bloodless takeover of Crimea demonstrated the country's new military capabilities. However, the downing of the Russian Su-34 by a NATO country could undermine the confidence in the military as a tool of foreign policy. 

More importantly, it can damage seriously the image of Putin as a strong leader who envisions the return of Russia as a major international player. Therefore, the Kremlin is almost obliged to follow a tough policy vis-a-vis Ankara. Economic sanctions are the safest option for the Russian side, but other things can come later. For example, Moscow can give military aid to the Kurds.

It is hardly a coincidence that Putin has labelled the Turkish government "accomplices of terrorists". He knows very well that the ISIL atrocities and the involvement of Russian Muslims in the Syrian conflict are feeding Russian nationalism which has taken an increasingly Islamophobic character. Turkey has long maintained a relationship with restive Muslim minorities such as the Chechens and the Crimea Tatars.

Putin's refusal to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan can be explained as a bargaining tactic before the eventual normalisation of Russian-Turkish relations.

But it can also mean that the damage to the bilateral relationship is beyond repair because Russian public opinion would interpret an immediate de-escalation as a humiliating defeat from a second-rate power such as Turkey.

History shows that nationalist sentiments can change the course of a country's foreign policy towards a neighbour. The coming weeks will show whether the Syrian conflict will develop into a Turkish-Russian confrontation.

Emmanuel Karagiannis is a senior lecturer at King's College London.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.