Update
Reuters is reporting that the shooter was an off-duty police officer:
ANKARA (Reuters) – The gunman who shot the Russian ambassador to Turkey in an attack at an art gallery on Monday was an off-duty police officer who worked in the Turkish capital, two security sources told Reuters.
Even worse.
Update 2
The assassination is starting to be blamed on the same Gülenists who were blamed for the coup attempt back in July:
Meanwhile, pro-government journalists in Turkey are beginning to suggest that the assassin was affiliated with the Islamist movement of exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, who is widely blamed in the country for orchestrating last July’s abortive coup. (He lives in the Poconos of Pennsylvania and Turkey is seeking his extradition from the United States.)
Tens of thousands of Turkish officials and public employees have been arrested in a sweeping national dragnet following the failed putsch, although Altintas does not appear to have been one of them.
Ankara’s mayor, too, has suggested that Gülenists were ultimately behind the assassination.
You’ll also see characterizations that what happened in July wasn’t a failed coup but a successful purge.
Original post
In a dangerous turn of events the Russian Federation’s ambassador to Turkey has been assassinated in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. The Mirror reports:
Russia’s ambassador to Turkey has been assassinated in front of terrified witnesses allegedly in retaliation for the crisis in Aleppo.
The gunman reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” and said in Turkish “We die in Aleppo, you die here” during the shooting which left Ambassador Andrei Karlov dead.
The attacker was fatally shot by police after wounding Mr Karlov and at least three others, according to state TV.
Mr Karlov was delivering a speech at an art gallery in the capital of Ankara when the gunman fired a shot into the air and then shot the ambassador in a suspected radical Islamic attack, the Hurriyet newspaper reported.
This is potentially disastrous. I’ll follow up as more information becomes available.
Other links
Wall Street Journal
CBS News
Washington Post
All of the above tell materially the same story.
Lots of quotes of reactions from Russian and foreign sources. Being updated on a minute to minute basis.
Gazeta has more pictures if you’re into that sort of thing. They’re also updating on a minute by minute basis.
Biographical info on Amb. Karlov in addition to the news story. Also being updated on a minute by minute basis.
Wait and see. It probably will not because Erdogan and Putin have been trying an reapproachment since the attempted coup last summer. In fact they met a couple of days ago in Astana for talks on Syria. That does not sound like 2 guys who are about to start a shooting war.
If this had happened before the coup that would have been a different story….
The video is shocking, as the gunman murders the ambassador and the stands there shouting at the audience & camera for about 30 seconds before the feed was cut off – at least in the video I’ve seen. The video was the first thing I saw about the story, in fact.
Interesting to se what Putin does. He needs his strongman rep back home.
Steve
Maybe Putin can blow up a busload of refugees in Aleppo in retaliation, perhaps following it up with a speech given shirtless, on horseback.
Aside from the pain suffered by the ambassador’s family, which is obviously tragic, I’m not seeing how this potentially disastrous. What am I missing?
World War I started with an assassination. Was the Turkish government involved in the assassination? The host country is responsible for the security of diplomats. How will Putin react? What are the domestic pressures on him?
There’s lots of room for concern.
Also, NATO.
But what can Putin actually do? Turkey is still in NATO, and the Turkish military isn’t a token force. It’s not Ukraine. Even once his puppet is installed in the White House I don’t see much in the way of military action Putin can take, and what else has he got? His moral standing? His diplomatic influence? His money?
A lot.
In addition Russia and Turkey are major trading partners. In fact Russia is Turkey’s second largest trading partner, just ahead of Iran. There’s a lot of pressure that Russia could apply there.
You appear to be assuming that if it came to blows that NATO would intervene on Turkey’s behalf. That itself is enough to be concerned about.
Let’s consider a comparison. Imagine that the U. S. ambassador to China is assassinated in Beijing tomorrow by a Chinese police officer. Would it be serious? Could it provoke a crisis?
Well, there will certainly be a lot of yelling and ritual scat-throwing. But obviously this isn’t Erdogan’s doing, and I have a hard time imagining Putin starting a war over what is almost certainly a lone wolf attack. Where would Putin drop bombs? Ankara?
I would not assume NATO would react other than diplomatically, and would in any event be stopped by Trump. Could Putin sink a Turkish boat or seize some Turkish “spies?” Sure. But he doesn’t share a border with Turkey, and he can’t claim to have suddenly discovered some poor, discriminated-against Russian Orthodox in Turkey.
And if he launches any kind of military retaliation he’s even more openly declaring war on all of Sunni Islam, in which case a dead ambassador is the least of his problems.
(Right now someone is patiently explaining to Trump that no, Turkey is not divided into white meat and dark.)
Russia has a long border with Turkey. Just not a land border see here.
Estimates of the number of Russians in Turkey vary from 50,000 to 300,000. Probably somewhere in between.
The distance across Russian-occupied Georgia doesn’t seem that long any more either.
Not great for moving tanks though.
True, but the Russians moved a lot of tanks across the Caucuses. I’m thinking if Russia wants to get aggressive, they move tanks and troops into some peripheral area of Turkey under the guise of protecting some ethnic minority that the Turkish government denies exists. It looks like most Armenian Turks now live in Istanbul (where I assume most Russians live in country), but there is (googling . . .) the Laz people near the coastal Georgian border. Putin asks, will NATO go to war over the Laz?
Turkey’s military is a serious force, and like Putin, Erdogan is a strong man who can’t be seen to back down. It’s one hell of a long drive in a tank from the Georgia border to Ankara. It’s a much shorter drive for Turkish tanks heading for Damascus. Open conflict with Turkey endangers Putin’s whole project in Syria.
There’s Putin’s Black Sea fleet, but he would want to ask himself how much he wanted them permanently cut off from the Mediterranean. His Syrian port isn’t much good without access to the Black Sea and he has nothing like the naval capacity to push through the Dardanelles. He would have to go full-on war and blow hell out of Istanbul.
I could be completely wrong, but Putin strikes me as a reasonably smart psychopath, unlike our idiot psychopath, so I suspect this ends with apologies, the killer suitably executed, and some back door concessions that will put some more money in Putin’s Swiss bank account.
I wonder if the biggest danger isn’t that Erdogan over-grovels and ends up looking weak. He’s got lots and lots of enemies. A destabilized Turkey could be a refugee disaster that would dwarf Syria.
Anyway, my money is on some strongly-worded cables, some sort of naval or air irritant, a deal or two canceled to be re-instated on more Putin-friendly terms, and Erdogan finds a way to blame the Kurds.
The situation reminds me that James Fallows, who lived in China for years, recently wrote that every Chinese person with whom he’d spoken on the issue believe that the U.S. deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. I think most Americans attribute negligence or incompetence to that episode, but the contrary human impulse to give order to seemingly inexplicable events is powerful.
Negligence or incompetence are always safe bets in explaining the mistakes that Americans make.
As I said, here is Putin’s response from rt.com, which I assume has been vetted to follow the official government line https://www.rt.com/news/370831-putin-russian-ambassador-ankara/
Basically Putin is blaming “terrorists” instead of the government. The reapproachment will continue. No sabre rattling from the Russians.
What should concern Americans is this shows how far the “Pakistan-ization” of Turkey has gone under Erdogan. And while Erdogan is in power there is no way to reverse it. Have American and European policy makers thought through the implications of an unreliable and unstable Turkey?
@CuriousOnlooker, that was my reaction to Putin’s response. He passes the 1914 test, which was not to make bellicose accusations and demands on the host country.
With the caveat that I’ve only heard/read English language summaries of Putin’s statements punctuated with brief quotes.
Not just while he is in power but for some time to come. I believe he’s been purging Kemalists along with Gülenists. “Pakistan-ization”, as you suggested above, is a good way to describe what’s been happening.
I don’t know what would be worse—an unreliable and unstable Turkey or a reliably opposed to our interests and stable one.
BTW, Michael, the operational readiness of the Turkish military may not be quite as assured as you’re claiming. Here’s Global Security’s assessment:
Quantitatively, they’re fine. Qualitatively, it’s hard to tell because of the ongoing purge.
I hope Andy chimes in. Although I don’t believe he’s a Turkey specialist, I’m pretty confident that his knowledge of Turkey’s operational readiness is greater than mine. The GS report makes it clear that its forces are not at C-1 readiness.
Fortunately, it appears that neither Russia nor Turkey is interested in going to war at this point. There’s still potential for disaster but it’s looking unlikely.
Doesn’t sound like Putin will do much about this, which is just fine with me. Of course, if an American president did anything so reasonable he would be called weak.
Steve