Keywords

1 Introduction

The full-scale war waged by Russia against Ukraine since February 2022 has many key players beyond the aggressor and the victim. Turkey is definitely one of these; it has acted as a mediator since the early days of the invasion and tried, so far, successfully, to balance being pro-Ukrainian without being openly anti-Russian. For example, Ankara and the United Nations (UN) played a pivotal role in brokering the Black Sea Grain Initiative, widely known as the ‘grain deal’, an agreement to restart crucial grain exports out of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. At the same time, it did not join Western sanctions against Russia. It took advantage of Russia’s vulnerable position to seek a discount on its Russian gas imports, which comprise roughly 45% of total gas imports (Soylu, 2022), and boost its ambition of becoming an energy hub for Europe.

Turkey’s positioning in this war matters not only because of its precious, although not always selfless, mediation but also because of its broader role in the Black Sea region and the ‘neighbourhood’ shared by the EU and Russia. Turkey is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member and, at least formally, a European Union (EU) candidate; it also holds significant diplomatic, strategic, and economic ties with Russia. Over the last ten years, Ankara's foreign policy has grown more assertive, becoming more active in the Middle East, South Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. This increased assertiveness goes hand-in-hand with a deterioration of relations with the West to the extent that a growing number of scholars (Alpan, 2021; Aydın-Düzgit & Kaliber, 2016; Sipahioğlu, 2017) openly talk about the De-Europeanization of Turkey's foreign policy, understood as ‘the loss or weakening of the EU/Europe as a normative/political context and as a reference point in domestic settings and national public debates’ in Turkey (Aydın-Düzgit & Kaliber, 2016: 5).

This chapter maintains that Turkey’s positioning vis-à-vis the war confirms the academic literature's descriptions of Turkey's foreign policy as growing more independent and seeking to balance its external relations. It claims that Ankara's approach to the war is based on pragmatic interests, status claims, and regional security balance. Turkey's stance depends on its relationship with Russia alongside Ankara's political dynamics and regional role. In its strategic partnership with Russia, Turkey has shown a mix of competition and cooperation rooted in economic and energy interdependence growth and the convergence of Moscow and Ankara’s security interests in Eurasia. (Demiryol, 2015: 65). At the same time, it is vital to consider the evolution of Turkey’s image, especially the discursive shift in national self-perception towards a more distinctive civilization based on Islamic identity (Tetik, 2020) and its pivotal role in its region (Udum, 2020). Questions remain on this approach's sustainability, especially in the case of a further military – and, possibly, nuclear – escalation.

2 Turkey’s Relations with Russia

Turkey's reaction to the unlawful Russian aggression on Ukraine in 2022 tried to balance pursuing a political and primarily economic alignment with Russia while maintaining positive ties with Ukraine. Therefore, it is worth unpacking the complex relationships binding Turkey and Russia on the one hand and Turkey and Ukraine on the other. An abundance of academic literature has looked at the growing ties between Moscow and Ankara and the ever-increasing political convergence between the regimes of Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This chapter maintains that Russia and Turkey have converged and become increasingly politically aligned internationally due to pragmatic trade or energy-related interests as well as their growing discontent at and criticism of European and USA policies. Despite this, Ankara has managed to juggle its partnership with Russia with a positive relationship with Kyiv and its commitments and obligations deriving from its NATO membership.

Turkey and Russia have shown elements of convergence over the last few years, whether in terms of their ‘similar logics of power accrual and maintenance’ (Öktem & Akkoyunlu, 2016: 470), their strict control over the Internet (Parkinson et al., 2014), widespread anti-American rhetoric (Özpek, 2021; Warhola & Bezci, 2013), or because in both countries ‘forms of democracy have been suborned by majoritarian nationalism, bolstered to varying degrees by the security state’ (de Bellaigue, 2016). Furthermore, several authors (Börzel, 2015; Göl, 2017; Isaac, 2017; Kirişci, 2016; Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, 2015) explicitly refer to Turkey and Russia as illiberal democracies, that is democratically elected regimes ‘routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms’ (Zakaria, 1997: 22). For instance, Göl (2017: 958) maintains that the ‘promising “Turkish model”, a mix of economic development and democratic reforms, turned into authoritarian rule and, similar to Russia, gave rise to illiberal democracy: Erdoğan ‘s authoritarianism is not a new type of political Islam, but old-school nationalism combined with illiberal democracy, as seen in Putin’s Russia’ (Göl, 2017: 964). According to Kirişci (2016), Turkey wants to build a new international order with actors, primarily Russia, that have ‘challenged, if not worked to undermine, the values of the international liberal order.’ In these regimes, although democracy is formally present, civil societies face severe constraints—i.e., lack of civil liberties—and, therefore, are prevented from actively participating in the decision-making process.

The increasing political convergence of the Russian and Turkish governments in terms of their illiberal nature, high level of confrontation with the West, and pragmatic economic, political, and energy interests explain the increase in Russian-Turkish cooperation in several domains. Focusing on Syria, Kostem (2020) uses the concept of alignment. This security-based partnership involves expectations of policy coordination to explore the ever-growing cooperation between Ankara and Moscow since the summer of 2020. However, Kostem also maintains that while ‘[s]ince 2016, Russian-Turkish cooperation has rapidly transformed into a new form of informal geopolitical alignment, […] there are important obstacles for the transformation of this informal alignment into a more durable form of partnership’ (Kostem, 2020: 796). This alignment between Russia and Turkey had been facilitated by their ‘shared aversion to what they perceived as the USA encroachment in their sphere of influence, i.e., the Black Sea/Caucasus region and the Middle East’ (Demiryol, 2015: 66). Trade interests were also pivotal in facilitating policy coordination in security terms. Russia is a key trading and energy partner for Turkey; in 2021, the trade turnover between the two countries was 35 billion dollars, an increase of 57% compared to 2020. Moreover, in 2021, Turkey got up to 45% of its natural gas, 17% of its oil, and about 40% of its coal from Russia (Ibadoghlu, 2022). Energy ties are so crucial—for Turkey in particular, but increasingly for Russia too—that there is ​​a tendency to politicize and even securitize them (Baev & Kirişci, 2017).

Several analysts and journalists use a popular label to describe the Russian-Turkish relationship as a ‘marriage of convenience’, especially in the Syrian war, where the two countries have managed to work together despite starting from very different positions (Barkey, 2017; Kardaş, 2019). The idea behind this concept is that both countries have found a way to cooperate and cohabitate in different shared neighbourhoods (mainly the South Caucasus and the Middle East) based upon compartmentalization and ad hoc pragmatic interests rather than a value-based alliance. On the other hand, Balkan Devlen prefers talking about a ‘marriage of Inconvenience’; given that there are a lot of inconvenient developments on the ground for Turkey and Russia, and each side's position creates inconvenience for the other. Ankara and Moscow need to find a compromise solution, a modus vivendi.Footnote 1 Devlen also highlights the instrumental nature of this ‘marriage of Inconvenience’, whereby Ankara instrumentalizes its relationship with Moscow as a lever in its relationship with the West.Footnote 2

3 Turkey’s Relationship with Ukraine

Turkey-Ukraine relations have already been in the international spotlight after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. However, a quick Google Scholar search reveals that only some academic articles deal with this subject. According to Yevgeniya Gaber, such scarcity results from two interrelated reasons: First, despite numerous regional experts, there are almost no experts on Turkey in Ukraine, just as there are no experts on Ukraine in Turkey. Second, Turkey-Ukraine relations are also a new topic: it was only after 2014 that Ukrainians started looking at Turkey as a security actor rather than a pure trade partner and vice versa.Footnote 3 This does not mean diplomatic relations have not been consolidated throughout the years. Ukraine and Turkey have a long history of bilateral political and people-to-people ties. After the break in direct bilateral engagement caused by the centralist foreign policy of the Soviet Union, the re-establishment of the diplomatic relations between Ankara and Kyiv was sealed by the signing of the Friendship and Cooperation Agreement in 1992. However, ‘despite the ongoing diplomatic track and economic cooperation, until recently, Turkey rarely dominated Ukraine’s foreign policy agenda, whereas Ukraine was hardly regarded as a truly strategic partner by Turkey’ (Gaber, 2021: 688).

In the past ten years, relations between Turkey and Ukraine have leaped; with establishing the High-Level Strategic Council (HLSC) in 2011, they gained strategic partnership status. Furthermore, a visa-free regime between Turkey and Ukraine was enacted in 2017, boosting bilateral trade and tourism. According to official Turkish data, trade volume between Turkey and Ukraine in 2019 amounted to 4.8 billion US Dollars, and 1 million 600 thousand Ukrainian tourists visited Turkey in 2019 (Turkish, 2022).

In the years before the February invasion, Turkish-Ukrainian relations grew more vital from a political and security viewpoint. Ankara saw its partnership with Kyiv as instrumental in turning Turkey into an influential regional power in the Black Sea basin, while Ukraine saw Turkey as a critical defence partner. Given Kyiv's need to modernize its armed forces, Ankara's role in selling advanced drones and helping Ukraine build its first modern corvette has been crucial (Kusa, 2022).

Turkey's link to the Crimean Tatars, a Turko-Muslim nation, has also been a bonding factor with Ukraine. Following the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russian authorities have been blamed for mistreating the Crimean Tatar people. In particular, Moscow's authorities are accused of arbitrary arrests, systematic stalking, and intimidation of regime opponents; unwarranted searches of the homes of Crimean Tatar community activists; forced passport station and conscription into the Russian occupation army; and intentional destruction of the Crimean Tatar cultural legacy and language (Morkva, 2021). Since 2014, the leader of the Crimean Tatar Turkish people, Mustafa Abdülcemil Jemilev, widely known by his descriptive surname Kırımoğlu (Son of Crimea), has vocally condemned Russia's persecution of Crimean Tatars. He claims Tatars make up roughly 13% of the Crimean population. Still, the demographic situation is rapidly changing because of the resettlement of one million ethnic Russians from the Russian Federation to Crimea and because high numbers of Crimean Tatars—300,000 since 2014—have fled (Anadolu Ajansi, 2022). Turkey never recognized Moscow's 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and kept treating the leaders of the Majlis, the Crimean Tatar parliament in exile that was banned by Russia, as its formal interlocutor. It has often spoken out in favour of Crimean Tatars. It has organized high-level prisoner swaps, like the 2017 liberation of Crimean Tatar political detainees Ahtem Chigoz and Ilmi Umerov, in exchange for two Russian operatives jailed in Turkey for their alleged role in the murders of several Chechen dissidents (Zaman, 2022).

Nevertheless, the case of Crimean Tatars exemplifies very well the limits of Turkey’s solidarity with Ukraine and condemnation of Russian actions. Despite the sometimes harsh rhetoric, Ankara chose not to sever ties with Moscow. On the contrary, Turkish officials often stress that a neutral (tarafsız) position enables Ankara to mediate in the conflict. ​​This approach—in stark contrast with the vast majority of NATO countries, which according to Erdoğan, ‘mainly act on sanctions’ (TCC, 2022)—will be unpacked in the next section.

4 Tarafsız: Turkey’s Stance Vis-a-Vis the War

Since the early days of the invasion, President Erdoğan has condemned Russia’s military aggression and lamented the war’s human costs. At the same time, he has stressed Turkey’s ‘special and exceptional position’ because of its geographical location and its NATO membership: ‘First of all, Ukraine and Russia are our neighbours from the Black Sea. We have deep-rooted, multidimensional, close relations and strategic partnerships with Ukraine. We take care to have a constructive and mutually trust-based dialogue with our other neighbour, Russia’ (TCC, 2022).

In line with this approach, Turkey has exercised its authority over the Turkish Straits under the 1936 Montreux Convention to prevent the Russia-Ukraine war from further escalating and, after some initial hesitancy widely seen as an attempt not to upset Russia, on 1 March 2022 it closed the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits to all military vessels.Footnote 4 Moreover, Ankara has set up numerous diplomatic initiatives to solve the conflict or tackle specific dimensions of it. After two meetings between delegations of the Ukrainian and Russian governments in Belarus in February 2022, a Turkey-Russia-Ukraine Trilateral Foreign Ministers meeting was held on 10 March 2022 in Antalya, hosted by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu (Turkish, 2022). Later, on 29 March 2022, Erdoğan welcomed delegations from both countries in Turkey, while in April, he coordinated a prisoner swap between the USA and Russia (Damilano, 2022). In September 2022, Turkey's mediation facilitated an unexpected prisoner exchange deal between Ukraine and Russia, releasing over 250 captives, 215 Ukrainians, and 55 Russian and pro-Russian fighters. According to an article published by the state broadcaster TRT, the September swap proves that ‘Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to be the most trusted arbiter between Russia and Ukraine’ (TRT, 2022).

Even if the tripartite meetings did not hold the expected results, the organization of the talks and the April prisoner swap further bolstered Erdoğan’s diplomatic credentials. They paved the way for Turkey's most successful mediation initiative, the ‘grain deal’.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine had a massive impact on global food security. According to EU data, Ukraine accounts for 10% of the world wheat market, 13% of the barley market and 15% of the maize market. It is the most essential player in the market for sunflower oil (over 50% of world trade) (European Commission 2022). Even if food availability is not at stake in the EU, the war affected costs throughout the food supply chain and disrupted trade flows from and to Ukraine and Russia. Turkey is one of the largest wheat importers in the world after Egypt and China, the largest flour exporter and the second-largest pasta exporter in the world. Figures released shortly before the invasion show that Russia and Ukraine are the primary wheat sources for Turkey, with Russia taking the lion's share, but imports from Ukraine rising to a record high in 2021 (Argus media, 2022). Hence, the supply disruption caused by the fighting has constituted a serious problem for Turkey and provided additional impetus to Ankara's diplomatic efforts in this domain. On 22 July 2022, the United Nations and Turkey brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative, known as the ‘grain deal’. The deal allowed exports of grain, other food, and fertilisers from Ukraine to resume to the rest of the world through a safe maritime humanitarian corridor from three key Ukrainian ports: Chornomorsk, Odesa, and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi. Furthermore, it established a Joint Coordination Centre in Istanbul, comprising representatives from Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the UN, tasked with overseeing the deal's implementation (UN News, 2022).

At the end of October 2022, President Putin pulled out of the deal because of the alleged lack of maritime safety that resulted in a drone attack on its fleet in the port of Sevastopol, which he blamed Kyiv for. As fewer vessels kept leaving Ukrainian ports despite Russia's withdrawal (BBC, 2022), Turkey and the UN worked hard to save the deal. Then, in a relatively quick U-turn, Russia agreed to rejoin the deal. The whole story was read as an example of Russian weakness and miscalculation on the one hand and Turkey's increased leverage on the other. At the same time, however, Russia's first withdrawal revealed the fragility of this agreement, which was canceled again by Russia in July 2023. At the moment of writing, Turkey is leading international efforts to revive the deal.

Even if it has failed to mediate a ceasefire, Turkey has kept trying to bring the two warring sides to the negotiation table. In his speech to the 77th General Assembly of the UN in September 2022, Erdoğan said, ‘We need to find a reasonable, fair and viable diplomatic solution together that will give both sides an honourable exit from the crisis.’ He also reiterated the importance of the grain deal, calling it ‘one of the greatest achievements of the United Nations in recent decades’ (UN, 2022). This approach confirms Turkey’s ambition to boost its mediator and ‘bridge’ role, a key goal Ankara holds that will be analysed in more detail in the next section.

5 Turkey’s Motives

Three factors help explain Turkey’s approach vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine: Ankara’s desire to boost its international status; the Turkish balancing strategy in its foreign policy; and economic interests, which make maintaining cooperation with Russia a priority. Russia’s invasion and war of aggression have allowed Turkey to bolster its image as a mediator and improve its international status. This is not a new endeavour for Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) under President Erdogan's rule. Since the early 2000s, Ankara has offered to mediate several crises in its neighbourhood, including Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia Trilateral Summit initiative (Turkish MFA, 2013). In tandem with Russia and Iran through the Astana group, the Turkish government aimed to influence the Syrian conflict in the Middle East. Erdoğan has also used the Turkey-led Organization of Turkic States to offer assistance and mediation in Kazakhstan during the unrest in January 2022 and between Armenia and Azerbaijan reemerging war since 2020 (Daily Sabah, 2022), but in all cases without much success.

The academic literature stresses that impartiality and neutrality are vital features of a mediator and, indeed, Turkey has often highlighted the need for keeping a neutral (tarafsız) approach. However, the literature ‘largely ignores the fact that when the mediator is a state, mediation often becomes a tool of foreign policy, if not the foreign policy itself’ (Akpınar, 2015: 2). Indeed, the mediator can aim at ‘enhancing his reputation or pleasing his constituency’ (Wall, 1981: 160). In turn, a country's diplomatic clout can raise other actors’ perceptions of that country's position in the global order, thereby improving its status (Paul et al., 2014). Turkey's constructive role was hailed by several international leaders—including high-ranking members of the US government, with which Ankara has been facing an increasing number of issues and disagreements, especially since the failed coup in 2016 (Kutlay & Öniş, 2021). White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby commended Guterres and Erodgan for the great achievement of the ‘grain deal’ (Al-Monitor, 2022). US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Twitter: ‘I would like to thank the Turkish government for helping facilitate the exchange of prisoners between Ukraine and Russia, building on their leadership on the grain deal’ (Sullivan, 2022). Both Russian and Ukrainian officials have praised Turkey’s mediation. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commended Turkey’s mediation strategy, marking its clear difference from Western ones (Hurriyet Daily News, 2022). Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba praised Turkey for mediating negotiations to end the ongoing war, adding that ‘Turkey and Ukraine have a relationship based on trust’ (Daily Sabah, 2022). It is possible that, for many Ukrainians, Turkey’s tarafsız approach and its closeness to Russia pose a severe credibility question. As Kusa (2022) remarks, ‘Both the Ukrainian government and public will always question Turkey’s positions and its reliability as an ally, and Ukraine’s growing dependence on the EU and the United States may exacerbate that trend, especially if Turkey continues to drift away from the West’. At the same time, the Ukrainian government has refrained from openly criticizing Turkey, being aware of Ankara’s centrality from a security and economic standpoint. According to Devlen, ‘Kyiv is not very happy about [Turkey’s] balancing act, but it does not have much choice; it would not be wise or politically advisable for Ukraine to criticize Turkey for that, at least for now’.Footnote 5 For the time being, therefore, Ukraine’s options are somewhat limited.

For Turkey, its mediation in the war is likewise an occasion to acquire more weight as a regional actor and carry out a balancing strategy in two domains: its relationship with Russia on the one hand and with the USA and the EU on the other.

The war may grant more leverage to Turkey in its relationship with Russia. The relationship has often been described as asymmetric, given that Russia is a much more powerful player both in economic and political terms. However, the nature of this asymmetry is ‘dynamic and subject to change’, and Turkey has started a process of ‘dependency reduction on Russia, both geopolitically and structurally (energy-wise)’ (Dalay, 2021). The war in Ukraine could help Turkey achieve more independence and leverage. As shown by the signing and resumption of the grain deal, Turkey has an increasingly influential role in this war, and it is unlikely that this political and diplomatic capital will fade away soon, even if the fighting stops. In turn, a much more economically vulnerable and politically isolated Russia could be in a weaker position vis-à-vis Turkey. Not to mention that, for Russia, Turkey remains one of the main channels of communication with the West. As Gaber claims, ‘There are several European politicians [willing to talk to Putin], but president Erdoğan is a better and more vocal communicator for Putin's messages than any of them’.Footnote 6

Given its augmented sway, Turkey is likely to act in a more pragmatic—even cynical—way towards Russia, using its leverage in the context of the war to extract benefits from Moscow in other contexts. One example is the Syrian war, where Ankara required Russian compliance in pursuing its fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and strengthening its presence in Idlib. The issue is all the more critical given that the presence of millions of Syrian refugees is putting growing stress on Turkey's social services, and this has become one of the hottest issues in the May 2023 campaign for the presidential election. If it is true that a weakened Russia may bring about advantages for Turkey, it is equally true that Ankara does not consider Russia's defeat as a beneficial scenario. On the one hand, a quick Russian win would confirm Russia's image of mighty military power and role of security provider to many neighbouring states in the region, including Turkic states in which Ankara has been carrying out intense foreign policy. On the other hand, as Galip Dalay highlights, Ankara is ‘against an excessive weakening of Russia because it would mean a Western resurgence’.Footnote 7 This stance is only apparent though it confirms the ‘adversarial cooperation’ (Dalay, 2021) which characterizes the relationship between Moscow and Ankara.

Turkey also aims to carry out a balancing act in its relationship with the US and the EU. The shift towards a ‘post-Western’ order has increased Turkey’s quest for ‘strategic autonomy’ and its shift away from the West, causing the phenomenon of ‘de-Europeanisation’ of Turkey’s foreign policy mentioned earlier in this chapter. As Kutlay and Öniş (2021: 1096) remark, ‘for most of the post-1945 period, Turkey was firmly embedded in the Western alliance. However, relations began to change in the second decade of AKP rule, with the West increasingly reframed as the significant ‘other’ in Turkish foreign policy, especially in Turkey–EU relations.’ From Ankara’s perspective, therefore, it is understandable that a growing presence and influence of NATO countries, and especially the USA, in the Black Sea—considered by Turkey as its backyard—constitutes a problem. For this reason, Turkey has also invested in its relationship with Kyiv. According to Gaber, Ukraine matters to Turkey precisely because it offers a chance to ‘deter Russia without necessarily getting more NATO involved’, acting as a ‘counterweight to Russia but without being part of the collective West’.Footnote 8 The similar ‘adversarial cooperation’ logic described for Russia-Turkey relations applies to some extent to Ankara’s relationship with the West—and with Ukraine, given its increasing dependence on and identification with the ‘Western camp’. Gaber reports a widespread view among Turkish pro-government experts who think that the West wants to weaken Russia (and Turkey) using Ukraine; for them, a clear Ukrainian victory would mean ‘no counterweight to the Western presence’, so ‘Turkey wants Ukraine to win without Russia losing’.Footnote 9

Economic interests also form part of Turkey’s strategic calculus in the framework of the war. In an effort to portray itself as a neutral country able to mediate in the conflict, Ankara did not join the West’s sanctions against Russia; trade with Moscow, on the contrary, increased substantially. According to a study by the Central Bank of Finland, between February and July, Turkey increased its exports of goods and products to Russia by 42%; in August alone, the increase reached 87% compared to the same period in 2021, according to data from the Turkish Exporters’ Assembly (Bourcier, 2022). A New York Times investigation has registered a 198% increase in Turkey's overall trade with Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, a growth second only to India's (Gamio & Swanson, 2022). Turkey is not alone in keeping trade links with Russia very much alive. Instead, it is part of a broader trend that sees many countries pragmatically keeping economic ties with Russia despite the war, especially in the Global South. After all, Russia’s global exports grew after it invaded Ukraine, even in many countries that have vocally opposed Russia—much to the frustration of Western officials, ‘who had hoped to undercut Russia’s war effort by punishing its economy’ (Gamio & Swanson, 2022).

For Ankara, energy is an essential aspect of trade cooperation with Russia, mainly because Erdoğan did not want to take risks of energy shortages or excessive rises in energy prices in the runup to presidential and parliamentary elections in May 2023. Despite an attempt to reduce energy dependence on Russia, Turkey still imports almost half of its gas and about a quarter of its oil from Moscow, and Turkey doubled its imports of Russian oil this year (Reuters, 2022). In a meeting in Sochi in August, Putin and Erdoğan discussed expanding Turkish-Russian energy cooperation. The Turkish president exploited this opportunity to ask for a discount on natural gas (Ahval News, 2022). The discussion continued in a meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Astana in October, where Russia's President proposed to his Turkish counterpart the creation of a ‘gas hub’ in Turkey to export gas to Europe (Bolton, 2022). The ‘gas hub’ project, which has been discussed for years, faces several objective challenges: from logistics issues linked to increasing the amount of Russian gas delivered to Turkey through the TurkStream pipelines to the lack of competitiveness of Turkey's subsidized domestic gas market. Yet, the plan is widely described by Turkish pro-government media as an achievement and promising development, even more so as EU countries are in the middle of an energy crisis due to, among other things, decoupling from Russia as a reaction to the war in Ukraine.

6 Perceptions and Attitudes in Turkey

On the eve of the American war against Iraq in 2003, thousands of Turkish citizens joined anti-war protests against USA foreign policy in the Middle East. Public opinion polls at that time showed that more than 90% of Turks opposed the war. Such large manifestations impeded a proposal to allow American troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil from passing in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (Kiratli, 2018). Despite 145,000 Ukrainian refugees in Turkey, according to UNHCR October 2022 data, and the vocal outreach activities of Tatar activists, no such shows of condemnation of Russia's actions have occurred since the start of the invasion. Rallies did take place in several Turkish cities, driven by the members of the Ukrainian community living in Turkey. However, they usually failed to gather more than tens, at maximum hundreds, of people. At the same time, shameful episodes like a group of Fenerbahce fans chanting the name of the Russian leader against the Ukrainian team Dynamo Kyiv in a July match (Al Jazeera, 2022), although not necessarily indicative of diffuse Putinism among the population, placed the spotlight on the phenomenon of Turks’ ‘lack of empathy’ with Ukraine.

While an in-depth analysis of societal attitudes falls beyond the scope of this chapter and would require a separate study, it is essential to touch upon the main factor behind this ‘lack of empathy’, that is, anti-Westernism. Anti-Western sentiments, especially anti-American sentiments, are diffuse within the population and contribute to informing the government's policy choices. Turkey's divisions between East and West are not new, but they are both connected and gaining relevance in light of the country's quest for growing strategic autonomy in foreign policy. In a Metropoll poll from January 2022, 37.5% of respondents declared that Turkey should prioritize the EU and the USA in its foreign affairs, while 39.4% said they preferred Russia and China; in a Metropoll poll from March 2022, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, the percentage of Turks still thinking that relations with Russia and China should be given priority had decreased but remained around 30% (Dağı, 2022).

Anti-Americanism has deep roots and sharply increased in the 2000s due to the war on Iraq. In the words of Güney (2008: 476), ‘The war on Iraq, started by the USA in March 2003, had significant repercussions for the long-lasting strategic partnership between the two countries by creating a serious crisis of confidence on both sides and eventually putting the alliance under scrutiny.’ Anti-Americanism grew after the 2016 failed military coup in Turkey, primarily because the USA has refused to extradite Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who has lived in self-imposed exile in the USA since 1999 and whom Turkey considers responsible for the coup attempt. Pro-government media have increased their anti-American rhetoric in the framework of shrinking civil rights and media freedom in Turkey after the coup. According to a 2020 study, Turkey’s ‘domestic media framed and reported the US-related news with a more negative slant, including offensive and pejorative narratives about the United States of America and its politics’ (Onat et al., 2020: 139). Today, a very high number of Turks, almost 60%, consider the US as the biggest threat against Turkey's national interests, double the number of those indicating Russia (Ünlühisarcıklı et al., 2022). A perceived lack of solidarity from EU leaders after the coup attempt also reignited anti-EU sentiments that were already widespread due to frustration with Turkey’s stagnated membership process. However, trust in the EU is higher compared to the USA (Ünlühisarcıklı et al., 2022).

Anti-Americanism can also explain why the Turkish public’s approval of NATO has consistently been the lowest among member countries since 2011, ranging between 15 to 25%, spread across the political spectrum (Tremblay, 2022). This, in turn, explains why so many Turks blame NATO and the West for the war in Ukraine and have a more acquiescent and understanding approach towards the aggressor. A March 2022 Metropoll survey revealed that only 33.7% of respondents blamed Moscow for the war, while nearly half held the United States and NATO responsible (Yazıcıoğlu, 2022). These polls and the lack of massive anti-war rallies do not mean that Turks are not worried by Putin’s war or that empathy and solidarity towards Ukrainians are nonexistent. They could be taken as anecdotal evidence that Turkish society has turned more inward-looking due to the backsliding of democracy and drastically worsening living conditions in the country. As a Turkish civil society activist remarked, society has been in ‘survival mode’ for a long time.Footnote 10 These behaviors could also point to a broader political trend that sees Turkey and other emerging countries being increasingly supportive of a multipolar vision of international relations. A vision according to which Turkey’s influence and independent foreign policy can thrive without necessarily picking a side.

7 Conclusion

This chapter has analysed Turkey’s tarafsız, hence neutral, approach to Russia’s war against Ukraine. One can conclude that Turkey’s attempt to perform a ‘balancing act’ between antagonistic sides—Russia and Ukraine (and the West)—confirms the interpretations in the academic literature of Turkish foreign policy as growing more assertive, independent, and seeking to strike a balance in its external relations. Turkey’s reaction also seems to clarify its preference for a multipolar world in which the West is not the only center of power. A multipolar world order—even if asymmetric—allows middle powers like Turkey to sway between pro-Western and anti-Western attitudes without necessarily committing to either side.

The analysis also raises an important question: how sustainable is Turkey’s neutral approach? As the war keeps raging—and its outcome is far from certain at the moment of writing—the success of Turkey's leadership and role as a mediator in the war seems to indicate Ankara's growing influence thanks to its autonomous foreign policy. President Erdogan, after his reelection in May 2023, has reiterated his willingness to continue acting as a mediator. In early June 2023, for instance, he held separate phone calls with Ukrainian and Russian counterparts, offering to create an international mechanism to investigate the collapse of the Ukrainian Nova Kakhovka dam, for which Ukraine and Russia blame each other (Akin, 2023). Yet, there are limits to this approach, and future military developments can call its sustainability into question. The Western factor limits Turkey's ability to exploit Russia's economic isolation, for instance, when it comes to sanctions.

Turkey has received heavy pressure from the USA and the EU to join sanctions or block Russia's attempts to evade sanctions through the Turkish banks integrated into Mir, Russia's domestic payments system. At the end of September 2022, Turkey bowed to US pressure and announced that its banks, still processing Russian payments, were withdrawing from the Mir system (Jones, 2022). Western pressure, which could intensify in light of a military war escalation, could also significantly jeopardize Turkey's impartial approach. Indeed, if the conflict extends beyond the two fighting parties, Turkey would be forced to abandon its ‘balancing act’ and pick a side, particularly in light of its NATO membership. In Devlen's words, ‘anything that reduces Turkey's room for maneuver is a concern for Ankara. In particular, Russia's possible, although unlikely, use of nuclear weapons’.Footnote 11

It is reasonable to expect that, in the near term, Turkey will remain an indispensable intermediary in the conflict. It is also expected to capitalize on its diplomatic gains to further boost its international status, and to use the latter as a lever in its relationship with Russia and the West. However, a potential vertical and horizontal escalation, as well as pressure from Ankara’s Western partners, may undermine the sustainability of Turkey’s tarafsız approach.