I understand it when people say “Russia and Turkey are the same” as a humorous gesture of sorts. But when this is said seriously, it scares me because one needs to amputate all memory of very recent events in order honestly to see no difference.
Let’s just look at a single little difference between the two countries. Who annexed a large territory from a neighbor by threatening to use nuclear weapons?
Annoying and distasteful is one thing – and Erdogan is obviously is all that and more, but seriously and calmly deploying nuclear weapons, as Putin recognized he did in order to annex the Crimea, is in a different order of magnitude. And by the way, everybody who was there when the threat was made took it very seriously, as we saw from later events, so let’s not start pretending that we know better and qualifying the threat as not serious.
I have no interest in “defending” Erdogan but I’m tired of false analogies, carelessness, and people’s persistent need to deny that the world is complex and varied and that things don’t need to be “just like” anything else.
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