Kremlin hopes Russian media outlets will experience no restrictions in Turkey

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The Kremlin hopes that the Russian media outlets in Turkey will not face situations similar to what Sputnik journalists experienced, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on March 2.

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The Kremlin spokesman added that Russia’s Foreign Ministry had already expressed "deep concern over such actions against media representatives."

"We, of course, hope that media representatives, all the more so, those who are working for the Russian media, such as Sputnik, will not experience any restrictions and will not face situations similar to what occurred the other day," the Kremlin spokesman commented on the detention of Sputnik Türkiye employees on March 1.

Turkish police on March 1 detained the editor-in-chief of Russia's Sputnik Türkiye news agency in Istanbul, the global head of the state-run agency said, but he was released after a phone call between the foreign ministers of the two countries.

Mahir Boztepe was detained and police searched the offices of his news agency, according to a post on Twitter by Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Rossiya Segodnya, RT and Sputnik.

"Turkey, what is this?" Simonyan wrote.

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke by phone with his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu later on March 1 and called for the situation with the Sputnik journalist to be resolved quickly.

Boztepe's detention came a day after a crowd of people chanted slogans outside the homes of three Sputnik journalists in Ankara, one of the journalist's relatives said.

"What appears to have been a coordinated attack came at a time of heightened tensions in Idlib between Syria and Turkey," Sputnik said on its website.

The Journalists' Union of Turkey said the intimidation of reporters and their detention were unacceptable.

"Journalists cannot be made to pay for the tension between states," the union said on Twitter.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Feb. 29 he asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to stand aside in Syria and let Turkey fight Syrian government forces alone. The two are expected to meet for talks in Moscow this week.

Both Russian state news agencies RIA and TASS reported that retaliation measures against Turkish media would follow soon, citing an unnamed Russian diplomatic source