| Erdogan is seeking Putin’s financial help, as Mustafa Sonmez explained, including a discount for Russian natural gas on which Turkey is heavily reliant. Putin may well be amenable, if not necessarily on Erdogan’s terms. Russia is proposing instead that Turkey pay for a quarter of its Russian gas imports in rubles.
As I noted earlier this week, Putin certainly wants to see Erdogan remain in power. Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom has signed a $9.1 billion credit line to ROSATOM, the state-run company that is building Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, Middle East Eye reported today. The money will help shore up Turkey’s dwindling hard currency reserves as it will be wired to a Turkish bank.
Mark Galeotti, a leading Russia expert and founder of Mayak Intelligence, got into further fascinating detail about the dynamics of the Turkish Russian relationship in our weekly podcast On The Middle East. Do give it a listen.
The Ukraine grain deal, the conflict in Syria and the Akkuyu nuclear power plant were among the top agenda items, according to Turkish media.
Erdogan’s meeting with Aliyev came as Azerbaijan plunged into a new bout of fighting with Armenia which left scores of dead on both sides. Andy Wilks reported on the background to the violence, the deadliest since the two former Soviet states went to war in September 2020 over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Azerbaijan appears to be seizing on Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine to press its advantage in the field using Turkish Bayraktar drones against targets inside Armenia, including Russian-made S-300 anti-missile batteries. Ankara’s full-throated support for Azerbaijan, as I detailed here, will have only stiffened Congressional resistance to the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey. Turkish deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal is in Washington to hold talks on the F-16 deal, which has the administration’s blessing.
He will undoubtedly be getting an earful about Turkey’s deepening financial relations with Russia.
The Financial Times reported that the United States and the European Union are stepping up pressure on Turkey to enforce sanctions on Russia.
That message apparently has already filtered through to the tourism industry amid reports that numerous hotels are refusing to accept Mir credit payments from Russian clients as revealed by Middle East Eye’s Ragip Soylu. However, Erdogan and Putin discussed a proposal for Russian companies to export their goods via Turkey today. If so, Erdogan clearly is less bothered by Western warnings.
Meanwhile, Turkish Twitter was all aflutter today with claims that Erdogan had told members of his ruling Justice and Development Party that he had “wished” that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had come to Samarkand. “I would have spoken to him,” Erdogan said, according to pro-government columnist Abdulkadir Selvi. The claims follow reports that Turkey’s spy chief Hakan Fidan met with his Syrian counterpart Ali Mamlouk multiple times over the past few weeks in line with Russian calls for Ankara and Damascus to bury the hatchet. The meetings are meant to lay the ground for a potential meeting between Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and his Syrian counterpart Faisal Mekdad. Assad is said to be playing hardball, demanding that Turkey withdraw its troops as a precondition for dialogue and refusing to talk to Sunni opposition leaders under Ankara’s wing.
Fidan has been super busy, as Fehim Tastekin explains in his latest about the spymaster’s controversial trip to Iraq.
Nazlan Ertan reports from Izmir on how pop icon Tarkan triggered a fresh row between Turkey’s pro-secular opposition and the government and among historians with his electrifying concert in Izmir to mark the city’s liberation from Greece. |