Turkey has offered to mediate in the Ukraine crisis as tensions between NATO and Russia escalate, with fears that Russia might be gearing up to invade eastern Ukraine. The proposal from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has previously passed messages between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, seems to have generated little enthusiasm in Moscow and Kyiv.
Turkey has followed an inconsistent policy in the NATO-Russia row fueled by the Ukraine crisis. On one hand, it has irked Moscow by supplying Bayraktar TB2 armed drones to Kyiv and rejecting Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Also, it has fervently backed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia even as Russian President Vladimir Putin sees NATO’s expansion toward Russian borders as a red line.
On the other hand, Ankara has opposed Western sanctions on Russia. “Turkey does not believe that sanctions will resolve the problems,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu insisted at the NATO meeting in Riga Dec. 1. Furthermore, the TurkStream gas pipeline from Russia to Turkey, inaugurated last year, shows Ankara’s willingness to go along with Russia’s strategy of diversifying energy routes by bypassing Ukraine.
And while Turkey backed the formation of a joint force between Black Sea littoral states in the 1990s, it appears enthusiastic today on US plans for a NATO naval force in the region.
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