Turkey-Russia aircraft crisis and Turkey-Russia relations on the axis of handling style of the crisis in the Turkish media

Relations between Turks and Russians, which have been interacting from the past to the present, have had a different structure, especially after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although perspective of Turkey and Russia in regional issues affect their political relations from time to time, their economic relationships have continued. A closer period of political and economic relations had begun between two countries in the 2000s. The main factor during this period was energy supply and the economic situation created by energy demand-supply relation between Turkey and Russia. According to Turkey, Russia was in the position of main energy provider; whereas according Russia, Turkey was both a different destination and an important market on the basis of energy. Apart from this, the political relations established with many visits between the two countries, especially in the period of 2009-2012, have reached the dimension of strategic partnership. The relationship between the two countries, at the best level in the history, has been worse than the cold war period because of the Aircraft Crisis in 2015. This event was in the headlines and discussed in the Turkish media for a long time. In this study, Turkish-Russian economic and political relations between World War I and 2015 were discussed. Teun van Dijk's method of critical discourse analysis was used to evaluate how the incident was handled in the Turkish press. Accordingly, the news on the first pages of the newspapers Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Sabah, Sözcü and Yeni Şafak, which were published nationwide between November 25 and December 1, 2015, were examined and analyzed according to the categories of ideological analysis used. As a result of the study, the findings were interpreted in the context of the impartiality principle of journalism.