Kremlin boss Putin likes to keep state guests waiting. But at the summit meeting in Tehran, the Turkish head of state Erdogan simply turned the tables. The Russian President doesn’t seem to like that at all.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long been known to keep state guests waiting. Now the Kremlin boss himself has fared like those he wants to impress with it. At his meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday in Tehran, it was Putin who had to wait an agonizingly long time for his interlocutor.
A published video recording shows Putin alone entering the conference room filled with journalists. But contrary to expectations, Erdogan does not follow him directly. The Kremlin boss stands in front of the two reserved chairs, crosses his arms and looks towards the entrance. But when Erdogan still doesn’t show up, the 69-year-old seems increasingly impatient. He twitches the corners of his mouth, shifts his body weight from one leg to the other and lowers his eyes.
After about 50 seconds, which seem like an eternity, Erdogan enters the room. Immediately one sees Putin’s tension drop. Both heads of state greet each other with a handshake. The video caused a lot of Schadenfreude on Twitter. “Putin gets a taste of his own medicine,” writes one user. You can see the “entire range of emotions from the ‘humiliated and insulted'”.
The journalist Joyce Karam speculates on Twitter that Erdogan may have wanted to take revenge with his behavior. In 2020, the Turkish President and his staff had to wait two minutes for Putin in a Kremlin antechamber during a visit to Moscow. This incident is also documented on film and was exploited by the Russian media at the time. The Turkish public took the act as a deep humiliation.
