What Erdogan and Putin discussed in their meeting in Sochi. The details and the background
On Wednesday 29 September, the presidents of Russia and Turkey, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, met in the Russian city of Sochi, on the Black Sea. The meeting – the first between the two in more than a year – is lasted three hours, as three were the main topics of discussion, reports the New York Times: weapons, bilateral trade and the nuclear reactor that Russia is building in Turkey. RELATIONS BETWEEN RUSSIA AND TURKEY
The relations between Moscow and Ankara are very particular, and precisely this ambiguity means that we cannot speak of an alliance: Turkey is part of NATO, while Russia is the main target of the organization; Turkey and Russia’s customer for gas, but in recent years it has begun to get supplies from Azerbaijan, whose relations with Moscow are strained. Furthermore, Russians and Turks are fighting – by proxy, through various mercenaries – on opposing fronts both in Syria and in Libya, two countries relevant to their foreign projection plans.
On the other hand, between Turkey and Russia there are extremely important economic (on energy and defense systems, for example) and political relations that both governments want to maintain. For this reason, Erdogan and Putin prefer to manage their differences in order to keep the relationship stable and profitable, preventing them from escalating into a conflict.
Speaking to the press after the meeting, neither Putin nor Erdogan dwelt on the thorniest situations in Syria and Libya. THE OBJECTIVES
Ties with Turkey allow Russia to undermine NATO from within, an organization it perceives as a threat to its security. In reverse, contacts with Russia are useful for Erdogan’s Turkey to “keep the United States on alert” (members of NATO and main antagonists of Moscow) and possibly try to wrest concessions from them. Things between Erdogan and American President Joe Biden, however, are not going very well, according to Erdogan himself: among other things, in April Biden recognized the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as “genocide” between 1915 and 1923; a term that Ankara rejects.
The Turkish ambiguity is reflected in the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft weapons system, which Ankara bought from Moscow despite opposition from Washington, which judges the system incompatible with the country’s membership of NATO. The agreement on the S-400 prompted the United States in 2019 to cancel the contract for the sale of the new generation F-35 fighters to Turkey (the fear is that, through the S-400, the Russians may know the specifics of the aircraft) and to impose various sanctions.
Erdogan recently said Turkey could purchase a second S-400 system. THE ENERGETIC LINKS
Beyond defense, there are important energy agreements between Moscow and Ankara: Russia is building the first Turkish nuclear power plant, that of Akkuyu, and has built a pipeline under the Black Sea connected to the country, the TurkStream.
TurkStream went into operation in early 2020, with an annual capacity of 31.5 billion cubic meters of gas. Total Russian gas supplies to Turkey have increased by nearly 160 percent since the beginning of 2021, energy company Gazprom said.
During Wednesday’s summit, Putin said that it is thanks to TurkStream that Turkey is sheltered from the gas price crisis that is affecting Europe. However, one of the causes of the crisis is precisely the limitation of flows from Russia, which has raised suspicions of a manipulation of the European market for political purposes.
