Putin and Erdogan: a “marriage of convenience”
There has never been any love lost between Russian tsars and Ottoman sultans, said Amotz Asa-el in The Jerusalem Post. And until this month, relations between Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan were no exception to this “timehonoured” animosity. So the fact that Turkey’s president has now kissed and made up with his Russian counterpart is a dramatic new development. Should the West be alarmed by Ankara’s sudden pivot towards Moscow?
Erdogan certainly had a lot of making up to do, said Susanne Güsten in Die Presse (Vienna). He enraged Moscow in November by ordering the shooting down of a Russian bomber that Turkey claimed had strayed from Syria into its airspace. Insisting that he’d been “stabbed in the back”, Putin then imposed economic sanctions, and suspended previously agreed gas pipeline and nuclear power plant projects. It was all too much for Erdogan: Russia supplies more tourists to Turkey than almost any other country, and the Turkish tourist industry, already hit by fears of terrorism, has been knocked sideways by Moscow’s ban on chartered flights there. So in June, Erdogan wrote to Putin to apologise, and last month travelled to St Petersburg in a bid to get the sanctions dropped (successful, as it turned out) and to create a “strategic alliance”. All this, combined with Erdogan’s “rants” against Europe and the US, suggests Turkey could be turning its back on its allies and upsetting the geopolitical balance in the Middle East.
Putin and Erdogan both share a “sense of outrage” over what they consider their “pariah” treatment by the West, said Sushil P. Seth in the Daily Times (Lahore). Erdogan is particularly upset at Europe’s “ingratitude” for Turkey’s help in slowing down the influx of refugees; he thinks the US may have aided and abetted his enemy Fethullah Gülen, the Islamic cleric he believes to have been behind the coup attempt against him; and he feels badly let down by Turkey’s Nato partners, who, far from lauding his success in saving democracy from the coup plotters, have instead laid into him for his “sweeping” crackdown. By contrast, Putin quickly telephoned to offer congratulations.
But there’s nothing stable about this new rapprochement, said Maxim Yusin in Kommersant (Moscow). The two men may be smiling, but be assured – the downed plane incident has not been forgotten in Moscow. Nor can there ever be genuine friendship between countries that disagree on so much. Putin is propping up Syria’s Assad, whom Erdogan has long insisted should be ousted; there’s no sign that Turkey is softening its support for the rebel groups that continue to be bombed by Russian jets. Erdogan has also made it clear that Turkey, motivated by sympathy for Crimean Tatars (a Turkic people), still supports Ukraine over Crimea.
When it comes down to it, Ankara always tilts to Moscow when relations with its Western allies are strained, said Dimitar Bechev in Al Jazeera (Doha). It happened in 1997 when Brussels cold-shouldered Turkey’s initial request for EU membership talks, and again after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In each case, the new friendship quickly cooled. In sum, this is the old “marriage of convenience”, not a “newly flourished love affair”.