Putin says Russia’s relations with Turkey have fully recovered

President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia’s relationship with Turkey had fully recovered after what he called a crisis caused by Ankara’s shooting down of a Russian warplane near the Syrian border in 2015.

Russia retaliated against Turkey at the time with a slew of economic sanctions and Ankara later took measures which made life difficult for Moscow too.

UPDATE: Russia will resume grain exports to Turkey within the next few days after resolving issues with Ankara that had been restricting supplies, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said.

UPDATE: The idea of creating safe zones to protect civilians in Syria from fighting has wide support, but further discussions are needed to work out the details of how they would operate, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

Speaking after holding talks with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in the Black Sea Russian resort of Sochi, Putin said relations were finally getting back to normal and that trade had stopped falling.

“Some time ago our bilateral ties, as it well known, were tested. Now we can say with certainty remark that the recovery process in Russo-Turkish ties is complete,” Putin told a news conference. “We are getting back to a normal cooperative partnership.”

Putin said Russia would launch a joint investment fund with Turkey with funds of up to $1 billion and said Moscow stood ready to help Turkey improve security measures at its tourist resorts.

Turkey will continue to take measures against threats from its southern borders with Syria and Iraq, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday.

Erdogan, speaking at a news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin after a meeting in the Black Sea city of Sochi, said he believed Putin would play a major role in establishing a ceasefire in Turkey.

Erdogan said Turkey considered the Syrian Kurdish YPG, which the United States supports as an ally against Islamic State militants, as no different from the radical Sunni group.

“We do not differentiate between terrorist organisations. Daesh, YPG, Al Qaeda are all the same for us,” Erdogan said, in comments broadcast live on television. Daesh is an Arabic name for the Islamic State militant group.

“It is our mutual responsibility to scrape away their roots,” he said.

Erdogan has repeatedly criticised the United States for its support of the YPG in the fight against Islamic State. Turkey sees the group as a extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has carried out a three-decade insurgency in Turkey’s largely Kurdish southeast.

Turkish warplanes carried out air strikes against Kurdish militants in northeastern Syria and Iraq’s Sinjar region last month in an unprecedented bombardment of groups affiliated with the militant PKK.