Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Russia’s relations with Turkey have also seen difficult periods under Putin but have considerably strengthened since the attempted coup against President Erdogan in 2016. Today those relations have deepened due both to the personal relationship between the two leaders and to regional and global developments that have pushed the two countries closer together. Since Erdogan became prime minister in 2003—and president in 2014—he and Putin have developed a close partnership and good personal relations, punctuated by a short period of hostile relations. Both leaders rule as strongmen who have built highly centralized political systems characterized by crony capitalism, strict control over the media and civil society, and an aversion to popular expressions of opposition. Both view the US and EU with suspicion and believe that Western leaders would like to see them ousted. Both are allergic to Western lecturing about universal values and human rights. Turkey and Russia form an axis of the excluded: “states with histories of conflict, deep structural differences and divergent views, which seem to have come together more out of frustration with the United States than a new strategic vision of world affairs.” 35

Nevertheless, Turkey and Russia started out on opposite sides of the Syrian Civil War. Erdogan opposes the Assad regime and its Shia Iranian backers and has taken in more than two million refugees from Syria. He also opposes Russian support of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which has been fighting Islamic State and controls a swath of territory in northern Syria. Ankara sees the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, outlawed in Turkey, which it considers to be a terrorist organization.

After Russia stepped up its support for Assad in September 2015, tensions with Turkey escalated. In November 2015, Turkish forces shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet that, Ankara claimed, had briefly strayed into Turkish territory, the first time in fifty years that a NATO member had shot down a Russian plane. 36The pilot was killed. Russia denied the plane had flown into Turkish airspace and said it was flying over Syria. Erdogan voiced “sadness” over the incident but did not apologize. The Kremlin’s reaction was swift. Russia imposed harsh economic sanctions on Turkey and forbade Russian tourism companies from selling any vacation packages that included a stay in Turkey. The annual $30 billion Turkey-Russia trade decreased by almost 50 percent, although Russian gas still flowed to Turkey. Erdogan went overnight from being a valued Russian partner to being an enemy and was demonized in the Russian media. As Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, put it, “The circumstances are unprecedented. The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat.” 37

For months the standoff continued and the invective sharpened. Both sides accused each other of trading oil with Islamic State. 38Putin charged Erdogan with “Islamizing” his own society. During his December 2015 annual marathon press conference, whose audience included the dead pilot’s widow, Putin went further: “Probably, Allah decided to punish Turkey’s ruling clique by depriving it of its sense and reason.” 39Eventually one leader had to blink. And that was Erdogan. In June 2016, increasingly isolated internationally, he wrote a letter to Putin offering the apology the Russian leader had demanded after the jet was downed. 40A month later, there was an attempted coup by disaffected military officers, who accused Erdogan of abandoning Turkey’s secular, Kemalist heritage and eroding democratic freedoms. In the ensuing hostilities, 300 people were killed, but Erdogan prevailed, and the coup was defeated. Putin was the first leader to call Erdogan offering support, prompting the Turkish president to say, “It was very important from a mental perspective, this kind of psychological support.” 41Erdogan accused cleric Fetthulah Gulen, an exiled erstwhile ally who lives in Pennsylvania and leads an Islamic movement, of orchestrating the coup with help from the CIA and unsuccessfully demanded that the Obama administration extradite him.

Putin has not officially backed Erdogan’s claims about Gulen’s involvement but used the occasion of the coup to normalize relations with Turkey. He visited Ankara in August, praised “our friend President Erdogan,” and announced that both sides had agreed to set up de-escalation zones in Syria. Since then, the two leaders have met several times, Russian tourists are back in Turkey, and economic ties have been restored. The on-again, off-again TurkStream gas pipeline project that would carry gas from Russia to Turkey appears to be on again. When a disgruntled Turkish police officer assassinated the Russian ambassador to Ankara in revenge for Russia’s bombing of the Syrian city of Aleppo, the Russian response was restrained. Despite its opposition to the Assad regime, Turkey appears to have accepted that, with Russia’s help, Assad will remain in power for the time being. In May 2017, Turkey discussed the possible purchase of Russia’s advanced S-400 missile system, an altogether unprecedented move for a NATO member. The $2.5 billion deal was reportedly finalized in December 2017. 42After Turkey shot down the Russian plane, NATO worried about being dragged into a conflict with Russia. A mere eighteen months later, it began to question whether Turkey was reconsidering its own NATO membership.

Putin has managed effectively to bind Turkey closer to Russia as Erdogan’s resentment of the United States and the EU have grown. Since the attempted coup, 80,000 people in the military, judiciary, media, and education sectors have been purged, and both the US State Department and the EU have criticized Turkey. When President Trump met with Erdogan in September 2017, by contrast, he praised him as “a friend of mine. He is running a very difficult part of the world.” 43Nevertheless, the Trump administration has not extradited Gulen. Putin has never criticized Erdogan for his continuing crackdown and has encouraged his talk of Turkey’s Eurasian vocation, which could involve joining the Eurasian Economic Union. 44He has seized the opportunity to appeal to Erdogan’s suspicions of the West and to reinforce them. This remains an instrumental relationship, which could deteriorate again but for now represents “an ideology of sovereign values as a union of the deceived against the West.” 45

More so than with Turkey or other countries in the region, Russia’s new role as a go-to player is demonstrated by its relationship with a country that itself is often at odds with Turkey: Israel. The most striking change in Russian policy in the Middle East in Putin’s world has been the warming of ties with Israel. Israelis describe the relationship as “the best ever.” Although geopolitical factors can explain much of this shift, Putin’s personal experiences have also driven this rapprochement. Given Russia’s long history of official and nonofficial anti-Semitism, and the USSR’s hostility toward the Jewish state, the cordial ties between the two countries are all the more striking. Indeed, Israeli diplomats were conveniently absent the day the United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the Russian annexation of Crimea. The Foreign Ministry was on strike. 46Since then, Israel has maintained a neutral stance on the Ukraine crisis and has not joined the Western sanctions regime, although it maintains economic and political ties with Ukraine.

Putin’s family shared its Leningrad communal apartment with a religious Jewish family. In his autobiography, published when he first came to power, he says, “I got along very well with the elderly couple, and often played on their side of their apartment.” 47His high school German teacher Mina Yuditskaya emigrated to Israel in 1973. When Putin visited the country in 2005 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War Two with veterans of the Red Army who had emigrated, she met with him. He subsequently arranged to buy a new apartment for her, fully equipped with the most modern appliance. Reached by journalists to confirm this, she replied, “Putin is a very grateful and decent man.” 48The Russian embassy in Israel took care of her funeral arrangements when she passed away in December 2017 and Putin inherited her apartment.