Russia lashed out today at Turkey over its support for Crimea, with Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov calling remarks made by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, to the effect that the peninsula belonged to Ukraine, unacceptable. "The Crimea issue is what creates significant disagreements," Peskov said.

The rebuke highlights Turkey’s delicate balancing act, supporting Ukraine and Crimean Tartars while maintaining a multifaceted relationship with its largest Black Sea neighbor, Russia.

Cavusoglu was in Kyiv on Aug. 23 for the first Crimean Platform Summit organized by the Ukrainian government that aims to build up diplomatic pressure on Moscow over its 2014 annexation of Crimea. The land grab was not recognized by much of the international community and triggered sweeping sanctions on Russia. Cavusoglu told reporters ahead of the summit, “We have never recognized the illegal annexation of Crimea and we constantly emphasize that we will not.”

He may as well have been speaking on behalf of the Ottomans, who lost Crimea to Catherine the Great in the Turco-Russian War of 1768-74. Turkish nostalgia for Crimea and its solidarity with the peninsula’s Muslim Tatars, who were deported en masse by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Central Asia and face harsh repression under President Vladimir Putin, has persisted ever since.