The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 once again drew attention to the geopolitical importance of Turkey. A NATO member with 80 million people and complicated relations with the United States and Europe, Turkey’s stance would be critical to the Western effort to counter Russia. But Turkey’s stance has been ambiguous: while Turkey has condemned the invasion and provided weaponry to Ukraine, Ankara also refused to join Western sanctions on Russia and has maintained its relationship with Moscow. This stance is in line with a view of Turkey as an independent force in world affairs, disjointed from a West with which it no longer feels a commonality of interests, and which seeks to maximize Turkish narrow interests in a transactional relationship with major world powers.

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The Kurdish Question and the Decline of Turkey-U.S. Relations
To understand Turkey’s approach to the Ukraine war, it is necessary to take a step back and consider the ways in which Turkey’s view of itself, its role in the world, and its relationship with major powers has evolved over recent years.

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NATO membership is the only multilateral mutual defense treaty that Turkey is part of. Dating back to the Cold War, this membership anchored Turkey in the Western camp, and was in turn based on a strong bilateral defense relationship between Turkey and the United States – a relationship that was primarily a military-to-military relationship rather than a political one.

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The bilateral relationship was not without trouble even during the cold war, as Turkey’s conflicts with Greece and Cyprus in the Aegean led to acrimony, as did the U.S. unilateral withdrawal of nuclear missiles from Turkey during the Cuban missile crisis. Still, the logic of the Cold War led the two to maintain a close relationship up until the 1990s, with Turkey seeing the main threat to its security as coming from Moscow. This only increased in the 1980s, when the Soviet-supported Kurdish Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK) began an armed insurgency which prominently featured terrorist tactics.

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At the conclusion of the Cold War, the consensus in Turkey was that the country’s increasingly vulnerable situation made its relationship with the United States as important as it had been during the Cold War. Consecutive Turkish governments sought to position Turkey as a key U.S. ally in the face of regional instability in the Balkans, Middle East and Caucasus regions that surround Turkey. Thus both in 1990 and in 2003, Turkish governments accepted that it would be best to join with the U.S. as it embarked on military operations against Iraq, in order to have a seat at the table and ensure that Turkish interests be safeguarded in a post-war situation. But differences over the Middle East – and their implications for Turkish national security – led to a growing rift between Ankara and Washington, which is highly relevant to understand Turkey’s ambiguous position on the war in Ukraine.

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In 1990, President Turgut Özal overrode the objections of both civilian and military advisors and allowed the U.S. the use of the Incirlik military base in southern Turkey to attack Iraq following its occupation of Kuwait. Özal’s activist position, which sought to expand Turkey’s regional influence, was controversial in its day; but it was the harbinger of a more activist and independent Turkish foreign policy that would emerge in subsequent years. In other words, Turkey did act in close partnership with the U.S., but Özal did so in a way that would reposition Turkey as an important power of its own in the Middle East and not simply America’s junior partner.

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Yet the outcome of the 1990 Kuwait war would plant the seeds of the most important disagreement between the U.S. and Turkey: the Kurdish question. While the U.S. stopped short of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, it crippled the Iraqi government and imposed a no-fly-zone over northern Iraq. This in turn led to the emergence of autonomous Kurdish institutions in the heavily Kurdish-populated areas there. While the Iraqi Kurdish groups had their own difference with the PKK, they were not in a position to impose their control over the mountainous regions near the Turkish border. This also allowed the PKK to establish bases in Iraq, from which it staged attacks on Turkey. In parallel, U.S. sanctions on Iraq led to losses of billions of dollars in revenue for Turkish businesses. As a result, by the mid-1990s the consensus in Turkey was that partnering with the U.S. in Iraq had led to a deterioration of Turkey’s national security. While Washington remained strongly supportive of Turkey’s struggle against the PKK, much more so than European powers, it was an unavoidable conclusion that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had worsened Turkey’s security situation.

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The same set of questions returned in late 2002, when Washington once again planned an invasion of Iraq to finish the job left undone in 1990 – the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Again, Turks were divided on the matter, not least because U.S. planners appeared to take Turkey for granted, not providing much incentive to Turkey to allow America the use of its bases and airspace. The newly elected AKP government – which Erdogan did not yet lead, remaining under a political ban – was unwilling to oppose America’s demands, but equally unwilling to live with the consequences of partnering with the U.S. As a result, it allowed an open vote in parliament on whether to allow the U.S. to use Turkish territory, and refrained from imposing party discipline on its members. As a result, the parliamentary vote failed.

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This March 1, 2003 vote was crucial in widening the gap between the U.S. and Turkey. U.S. leaders at the highest level would blame Turkey for the subsequent U.S. failures in Iraq, while Turkish leaders would blame Americans for destabilizing Turkey’s neighborhood. And they were not without reason: following the U.S. invasion, the PKK took advantage of the power vacuum in Iraq to once again kick-start its insurgency, and the U.S., weakened by the chaos that followed the invasion, sought to prevent Turkey from intervening and destabilizing northern Iraq, the only part of the country that was relatively calm. Meanwhile, a de facto Kurdish state emerged in northern Iraq – the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). This led to growing tensions between Washington and Ankara, and to a rupture in the military-to-military relationship that had been the bedrock of the bilateral relationship. A tsunami of conspiracy theories ensued in Turkey over American intentions in the region, and many Turks became convinced the U.S. “Kurdish project” in the region now threatened Turkey’s own territorial integrity – indeed, that America’s aim was to dismember Turkey. Russia, of course, wasted no effort in promoting these suspicions through the use of its propaganda outlets.

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The advent of President Barack Obama in the United States seemed to ameliorate matters, because Obama extended a hand to the Muslim world while striking up a strong personal rapport with Erdogan – so much so that Obama once mentioned Erdogan among the five world leaders he established relations of confidence with. But as the situation in the Levant deteriorated following the Arab upheavals of 2011, it became increasingly clear to Ankara that Obama’s administration had different priorities. First, Obama’s actions as President and his subsequent interviews indicate that his major priorities in the region were two-fold: first, to end America’s military involvement in the Middle East; and second, to bring about a normalization of relations with Iran that would void the requirement for America to serve as a security provider to problematic allies such as the Gulf states and even, in Obama’s thinking, Israel. In other words, Obama sought to extricate the U.S. from the Middle East. In so doing, he toyed with the idea of relying on Turkey as a regional power through which the U.S. could act. But it soon became clear that the U.S. would not back Turkey when that would challenge U.S. ambitions when it came to Iran.

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It is against this background that the Syrian civil war became a true watershed in Turkish-U.S. relations. When Erdogan expressed his vocal support for regime change in Syria, Bashar al-Assad answered by simply handing over control over large parts of northeastern Syria along the Turkish border to Kurdish guerrillas. This led to the emergence of “Rojava”, a second Kurdish de facto state on Turkey’s border. Only, for Turkey, this was much worse than what happened in Iraq. The KRG, at least, was controlled by conservative Sunni Muslim Kurdish political forces with which Ankara was able to slowly develop a working relationship. This was the case not least because of their common enemy: the PKK, which not only harbored ambitions on Turkish territory, but also aimed to take control over the KRG. By contrast, Syrian Kurdish militias were under the direct control of the PKK, meaning that what had happened was the emergence of a PKK-controlled entity in northern Syria. This was close to a worst-case scenario for Turkey, and was coupled with a growth of Kurdish political mobilization inside Turkey.

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Meanwhile, Obama had also expressed his support for regime change in Syria. The national security bureaucracy in Washington – led by Secretary of state Hillary Clinton – supported American intervention, but Obama repeatedly refused to approve a more robust engagement. Instead, Obama made it clear that his absolute priority was the nuclear deal with Iran – which in turn meant abstaining from confronting Iran’s regional ambitions – particularly in Syria. Thus, Turkey felt itself abandoned by the U.S. in its response to the Syrian civil war.

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In Syria, however, Iran and Russia were a tandem: Russia’s intervention into the civil war in the late summer of 2015 was implemented in tight coordination with Iran – with the planning of the Russian operation reportedly involving the late commander of Iran’s Quds force, General Qassem Soleimani. This joint intervention turned the tide of the war, and came to target the Sunni opposition forces supported by Turkey and, theoretically, by the United States. Russian air power partnered with Syrian government forces to carpet-bomb the city of Aleppo, helping Syrian government forces gradually retake areas controlled by Turkish-supported militias. America’s refusal to intervene, which became clear already in 2013 following Obama’s unwillingness to enforce his own stated “red line” on the use of chemical weapons, can be ascribed in part to Washington’s preoccupation with the Iran nuclear deal, as well as the rise of the Islamic state, which changed the calculus of the Syrian conflict for Washington. Now the objective of defeating the caliphate took precedence over any ambition to replace the Assad regime. For Turkey, this also meant that the go-to power with whom it needed to maintain a dialogue to influence matters in Syria was not the United States, but Russia – incidentally, the same analysis that planners in Jerusalem made, as they developed a relationship with Moscow that allowed Israel to strike Iranian targets in Syria without leading to a conflict with Russian air defenses in the country.

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Meanwhile, U.S. efforts in the conflict now focused solely on ISIS. In order to defeat ISIS, the U.S. needed a local partner – just as it had used the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban in 2001. Turkey’s support for Islamist opposition elements in Syria implied that Washington did not see partnering with Turkey as possible or desirable. Instead, the Kurdish fighters did fit the bill – and from a public relations perspective, the presence of female Kurdish guerrillas confronting the Islamist extremists of ISIS became a media darling in the West. As a result, the U.S. – which considers the PKK a terrorist organization – now developed ties with the Syrian Kurdish fighters, under the pretext that they were a separate organization from the PKK. But as U.S. defense and intelligence officials have repeatedly conceded, they were very well aware that the Kurdish guerrillas they were arming were under the command of the PKK.

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To make matters worse, in July 2016 an attempted coup took place in Turkey, which the Turkish government (with considerable evidence) blamed on followers of Fethullah Gülen. Gülen, an Islamic cleric known to have a strong following in the state bureaucracy, resided in self-imposed exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania since 1999. His presence in the United States had always been viewed with suspicion in Turkey – but following the coup, it led to a near-consensus in the country that the United States had at best known of, and at worst masterminded, the coup attempt. President Erdogan himself is known to have feared an American-supported coup against him ever since the overthrow of Egyptian Islamist President Muhammad Morsi in July 2013.

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The combination of American support for the Kurdish fighters in Syria and the failed coup in July 2016 led to a dramatic change in Turkey. It led threat perceptions to change in a fundamental way: the United States now came to be seen by influential forces as a direct threat to the country’s territorial integrity and security. Anti-American sentiments in the country spiked, and more importantly, the calculations among key elements of the ruling elite and bureaucracy were affected as well. Previously pro-American constituencies now fell silent, or joined with critics of the United States – while the main pro-American force, the Gülen supporters, were purged. Expressing support for America could now lead to being labeled as a Gülenist.

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Russia in the Turkish Worldview
The perceptions of Russia in Turkey are multifaceted and importantly, there is no consensus in Turkey on how to approach Russia. Traditionally, Turkish nationalists and Islamic conservatives have been heavily anti-Russian. This is particularly true for the conservative nationalists known as ülkücü, who are influential in the army and national security bureaucracy. However, in recent years a small but very loud minority of nationalists have come to embrace an “Eurasianist” ideology, arguing that Turkey should join forces with Russia, China and Iran against the West. Among the Islamic conservative forces from which Erdogan hails, meanwhile, traditional skepticism of Russia has been tempered by a growing sense that Russia represents an important counterbalancing force against Western and in particular American hegemony. Analysts already fifteen years ago noted that common frustrations with the U.S. brought Russia and Turkey closer together. This is particularly the case for the two leaders, Erdogan and Vladimir Putin, who have sought to build one-man rule systems and who appear to have found a way to maintain a cordial personal relationship while occasionally disagreeing or even clashing on concrete issues. On a regional level and in specific issues, Turkey might oppose Russia; but on the global level, Turkey sees Russia as a balancer to the United States. This sentiment has strengthened remarkably following the Turkish-American tensions over Syria and the 2016 failed coup.

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In recent years, thus, the bifurcation between the regional and global levels of analysis in Turkish-Russian relations has become highly contradictory. Turkey has felt increasingly threatened by Russian maneuvering in its neighborhood. Moscow deployed advanced anti-access and aerial denial systems first in Armenia, then in Crimea following Russia’s annexation of the territory in 2014, and subsequently in Syria following its intervention there in 2015. These systems came increasingly to surround Turkey; but meanwhile, Turkey’s control over the Turkish straits put it in a position to choke Moscow’s naval connection between its Crimean port at Sevastopol and its Syrian operations.

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The potential for confrontation was therefore high. Indeed, a veritable proxy conflict developed between Turkey and Turkish-supported militias on one hand, and Russia and the Syrian regime forces on the other. When Turkey shot down a Russian fighter plane in 2015, Moscow imposed heavy sanctions on Turkey, leading to a rapid collapse of bilateral relations. Following a Turkish apology in 2016, relations were normalized and it appears a certain modus vivendi was established. This took place in great part because the interest of the two sides in controlling tensions between them; and such intentions were tremendously strengthened following the 2016 failed coup in Turkey. The Eurasianist nationalists in the government were to a significant extent responsible of convincing Erdogan to purchase Russian S-400 missile systems that in turn led Turkey to be removed from the U.S. F-35 fighter jet program.

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Ankara and Moscow then proved able to ‘compartmentalize’ their conflict in Syria, and maintain positive relations in trade and other areas. The same pattern repeated itself in Libya, where Turkey supported the Tripoli-based government while Russia backed the rival, Egypt-backed Libyan National Army led by Khalifa Haftar. It happened again in the Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 2020, where Turkey’s decisive intervention helped Azerbaijan reassert its territorial integrity by taking back large areas occupied by Armenia with Russian support since 1993. It should be noted that the Libyan conflict was far from central to the national interests of either side, and that Russia’s support for Armenia had weakened following a ‘velvet revolution’ in that country. These factors help explain why these proxy conflicts did not blow up the Turkish-Russian relationship completely.

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Still, it is clear that the two countries continue to pursue interests that clash on a regional level, just as Russia and China pursue a rivalry in Central Asia while appearing, on a global level, to hold up a common front against the West. But it must be noted that the Russian-Turkish relationship is much less institutionalized than the Sino-Russian one, and largely dependent on the personal rapport between Erdogan and Putin. Indeed, it is unlikely that the two countries would be able to maintain this intricate combination of rivalry and cooperation if one, let alone two of these leaders were to depart the political scene.

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Ukraine’s Role
The sense of Russian encroachment on Turkey’s neighborhood highlighted the role of Ukraine for Turkish strategists. Indeed, Turkey absolutely opposes Russian efforts to gain control over the Black Sea coast, as it has done from the time of the 2008 invasion of Georgia. That war led to Russian control over almost half of Georgia’s coastline, in Abkhazia; the annexation of Crimea led Moscow to extend its control almost all the way to the Romanian border. Naturally, Turkey strongly opposes this, which explains its strong position in support of the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine therefore put Turkey in a difficult position. On one hand, Turkish leaders had long been building close relations with Ukraine and had condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Erdogan built a positive relationship with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, and starting in 2019 Turkey’s Baykar corporation provided Ukraine with 12 Bayraktar TB2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Moreover, the engines for these UAVs are Ukrainian, and just weeks before the Russian invasion, Turkey and Ukraine announced that the two countries would co-produce TB2 UAVs in Ukraine. Meanwhile, as will be seen, Turkey’s economic dependence on Russia and its interest in avoiding totally alienating Moscow led it to embrace caution.

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On an official level, Turkey sought to present itself as a neutral mediator in the conflict, hosting several rounds of negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian representatives. This helped Turkey deflect some of the criticism for refusing to join Western sanctions on Russia, as Western powers expressed appreciation for Turkey’s role as a mediator. Still, after the negotiations collapsed, it also became clear that Turkey benefited tremendously in economic terms from its decision to abstain from joining Western sanctions. Turkey is dependent on Russian gas imports, while Russian tourism is of key importance to Turkey’s coastal regions. Turkey’s economy has been in dire straits for several years, with inflation rates approaching 100 percent, and the erosion of purchasing power having undone most of the advances of the boom in the early 2000s. As such, Turkey has argued that it cannot afford to cut economic ties with Russia.

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In fact, since the onset of the war, Turkish-Russian economic ties have boomed. Turkey has obtained deep discounts on Russian oil and gas, helping to alleviate some of the damage to the economy; further, the influx of Russian financial resources into the economy has been significant. For Erdogan and his ruling party, this has been crucial in an election year in which the President – in power now since 2003 – is seeking re-election in spite of his falling popularity. While Turkish elections are now far from fair, Erdogan would be unlikely to achieve re-election if the economy would deteriorate further. Russia, therefore, provides Erdogan with a lifeline. Indeed, Russia has allowed Turkey to postpone the payment of US$ 20 billion in natural gas imports until after the elections, thus helping Erdogan maintain economic stability and increase his chances of re-election. Turkey, meanwhile, continues to veto the enlargement of NATO to the Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Finland, though ostensibly for entirely unrelated issues. The level of Turkish intransigence, however, has raised the question whether this is also part of some quid pro quo with Russia.

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Yet in the middle of all this, the Baykar corporation has continued to supply Ukraine with 50 additional Bayraktar drones; Turkey has also supplied other weaponry to Ukraine, while in October 2022 a Turkish shipyard launched the first corvette produced for the Ukrainian navy. While Turkey has pointed to these military deals as corporate deals involving private entities, the Baykar company’s director is none other than Erdogan’s son-in-law, Selçuk Bayraktar, who married Erdogan’s daughter Sümeyye in 2016. Bayraktar has continued to be a vocal supporter of Ukraine throughout the conflict.

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Conclusion
There is no simple analysis of Turkey’s position in the Ukrainian conflict. It must be understood that President Erdogan’s absolute priority is his continued control over Turkish politics, something that requires the maintenance of some form of economic stability. That in turn requires Turkey to maintain a modicum of stability in its ties with both Russia and the West, given the economy’s exposure to Russian energy and Western investors. Meanwhile, on the regional front Turkey has gradually sought to build its own role as an independent power in the broader region surrounding the country. This has involved the projection of military force in Syria, Libya and the South Caucasus; the construction of Turkish military bases in Qatar and Somalia; and the expansion of Turkish influence in Central Asia. Support for Ukraine has been an important element in this.

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Still, these priorities have sought to make Turkey more independent from the United States; and that, coupled with the growing anti-Western attitude of the Turkish elite, has proven immensely valuable to Vladimir Putin. It explains, in part, why Russia has tolerated Turkish encroachment on its traditional sphere of influence. Turkey as a spoiler in NATO is so valuable that Moscow is willing to tolerate a lot before it would, as it did in 2015, risk destabilizing its relationship with Ankara.

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Meanwhile, from the Turkish perspective, Ankara is in a position to benefit from Russian weakness by improving the conditions under which it purchases Russian energy, and expanding its role in Russia’s backyard. But crucially, while Turkey agrees with the West in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supporting Ukraine’s independence, it differs radically on the end game of that conflict. The U.S. has made it clear it seeks to defeat Russia and ensure that Moscow will not, for the foreseeable future, constitute a threat to its neighbors. But Russia’s defeat – and a scenario involving regime change or Russia’s decline – would, from the Turkish perspective, restore American hegemony over Europe and parts of Eurasia. This is not an objective Turkey would support. Quite to the contrary, as mentioned, Turkey views Russia as an important counterbalance to an American hegemony that Turkey fears would encroach on its own sovereignty and stability. It therefore seeks a negotiated settlement to the conflict that would maintain Ukraine’s independence, while keeping Russia as a relatively strong force in international affairs.

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In the final analysis, Turkey’s position in the Ukraine war in a combination of many factors. Some are of a short-term nature, intended primarily to safeguard Erdogan’s regime. Others, however, are indicative of a more deeply held Turkish ambivalence toward the United States, which stem from the diverging objectives of Ankara and Washington primarily in Middle Eastern affairs over the past two decades. These are unlikely to be overcome anytime soon. But the foundation for Turkish-Russian relations is fairly unstable, resting primarily on the personal relations between the two presidents. Uncertainty, thus, remains on how Turkey’s approach to Moscow will develop over the longer term, and whether the United States will be able to restore its strategic relationship with Turkey.