Ukraine, Crimea -- Where is Turkey in all this?
After all, despite various agreements, they have a lot to say about ingress and egress via the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, crucial to Russia.
Seems they may be conflicted, but haven't seen that they are included in Kerry mission talks. Seems like an important ingredient to me.
From the web -
"Turkey Torn Over 'Brothers' In Crimea, Good Ties With Russia
ISTANBUL -- Serkan Sava's ancestors left Crimea in a mass exodus some 150 years ago, after the Ottoman Empire staved off Russian pressure in the Crimean War but could not reverse the slow tumble that would lead to its dissolution after World War I.
A century later, the 35-year-old IT consultant's grandparents, by then rooted in the post-Ottoman Turkish Republic, would hear of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's deportation of hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia, in 1944, that cost the lives of more than 100,000 people.
This week, Sava stood under a steady rain at a protest of about 250 people -- mostly Turkish Crimean Tatars -- outside the Russian consulate in Istanbul. Noting that Crimean Tatars "have bad memories" of life under Moscow's thumb, Sava argued that Turkey should use its influence to ensure that the Black Sea peninsula remains a part of Ukraine and is not annexed by Russia.
Snip......
Amid the recent political upheaval in Ukraine, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey's foreign minister, was the first envoy to meet with Ukraine's new government in Kyiv, following months of protests that led to the ouster of the country's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
With an eye on the past, Erdogan himself has promised not to "leave Crimean Tatars in the lurch."
But Erdogan, who has appeared at times to relish conflict with other world leaders, has carefully nurtured his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and appears unlikely to stake out a position that would put Ankara-Moscow ties at serious risk.
"If you look at Erdogan's mercurial political style, he has pretty much yelled at every and any head of government he has dealt with with the exception of the Russian and the Iranian president," Cagaptay says, "not because he likes them necessarily but because Turkey gets about three-quarters of its gas and oil from Iran and Russia."
More at -
http://www.rferl.org/content/turkey-crimea-russia-demonstration-ukraine/25290858.html