MOSCOW, June 2. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has dismissed as nonsense and a falsehood Ankara’s claims Russia supplies weapons to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
"Turkey’s current leadership should give up attempts to blame all of its problems on external factors. All these claims about weapons supplies to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party are a falsehood and nonsense. They have nothing to do with the reality. In contrast to Turkey we do not indulge in illegal weapons supplies," Zakharova said.
Russia does provide certain weapons officially to the Peshmerga militia in Iraq, but it does so by prior coordination with the central government in Baghdad," she said. "The purpose is to extend assistance to Iraqi Kurds in their struggle against the Islamic State (outlawed in Russia). That purpose has never been a secret," Zakharova said. "Erbil receives such help from many countries, including Turkey."
"We urge Ankara to waste no efforts on the search for external enemies and to establish the necessary conditions for getting back to the track of a peace settlement of the Kurdish issue, however hard that might be, and also to take effective measures to terminate the transit of militants, weapons and chemicals through its territory to neighboring Syria," Zakharova said.
About Turkish officials’ initiative for creating some sort of a working group for the normalization of Turkish-Russian relations Zakharova advised Turkey to give thought to its own statements.
"You should make up your mind whether you keep swearing at Russia and saying things about our country that have nothing to do with the reality, or stop to think what is to be done to straighten out the situation. These two processes are incompatible," she said.