MOSCOW, December 7./TASS/. The Kremlin expects that the incident with the detention of Russian journalists in Turkey will be settled, and they will be released shortly, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
"Our diplomats are in contact with the Turkish side. We expect that this incident will be settled through a dialogue," the spokesman said. "We expect, we hope that our journalists will be released shortly," Peskov stressed.
"We will be taking whatever action is possible to help the detained Russian journalists," he pledged. Peskov declined to answer the question whether Moscow regarded the incident as an unfriendly move from Turkey. "We continue looking into the circumstances of this detention, the reasons behind it," he noted.
On December 4, the Russian Foreign Ministry reported that contact had been lost with two Russian journalists in Istanbul. The ministry said that the Russian journalists, reporter Alexey Petrushko and cameraman Ivan Malyshkin from Russia’s NTV channel, had last contacted their colleagues on December 3. They said then that they had been detained by unknown people who were taking them somewhere. Earlier, the broadcaster said that their employees stopped getting in touch after they had informed the editorial office about their detention by police officers near Istanbul.
The journalists were detained near the building of Baykar Savunma, a Turkish company specializing in the production of UAVs, a source in the Turkish Foreign Ministry told TASS on Friday. The reporters had no accreditation, the source said. Baykar Savunma produces, in particular, Bayraktar TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicle for the Turkish army.