Russia–Turkey relations

Slavic and Turkic peoples have been in contact for centuries along the Eurasian Steppe. Medieval Turkic kingdoms like Khazaria, Cumania, Volga Bulgaria, the Kipchak Khanate, the Khanate of Kazan, the Crimean Khanate, the Astrakhan Khanate and the Khanate of Sibir were established in parts of present-day Russia, with a continuing demographic, genetic, linguistic and cultural legacy.

The Turks in Anatolia were separated from Russia by the Black Sea and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to the northwest and the Caucasus mountains to the east. The Turks founded the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and began expanding outwards, while Russia was doing the same. The two empires began a series of clashes over the Black Sea basin.

The collapse of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottomans marked the end of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and Russia became the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church and its rulers inherited the Byzantine legacy.[1]

Punch cartoon from 17 June 1876. The Russian Empire preparing to let slip the Balkan "Dogs of War" to attack the Ottoman Empire, while policeman John Bull (UK) warns Russia to take care. Supported by Russia, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire the next day. These clashes eventually triggered the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.

Starting in 1549, the Ottoman Empire's support for smaller Turkic and Islamic vassal states in modern Russia (the Astrakhan Khanate, the Crimean Khanate, etc.) brought the two empires into conflict. The Black Sea was under Ottoman control when the Russians began their offensive against the Turks. In 1696 Peter the Great took Azov, but many more battles lay ahead. The Russo-Turkish War (1768-74) resulted in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. This treaty granted Russia passage to the Black Sea, making it possible for Russia to gain access to the Mediterranean Sea. It also allowed the Russians the privilege to intervene in the Ottoman Empire on the behalf of the Eastern Orthodox Christian populations. By the 19th century, Russia was helping Turkey's Slavic and Christian minorities to revolt against Ottoman rule. Russia did not always have in mind the goal of partitioning the Ottoman state, fearing this would aid the expansion plans of the Austrian Empire in the Balkan peninsula, which was largely Orthodox. Eventually, however, the desire for free passage through the Turkish Straits and Pan-Slavist feeling at home pushed Russia in that direction, leading to the decisive intervention in 1877–78.

The Russian goal of controlling the Straits and gaining access to the Mediterranean led to a determination to weaken the Ottoman Empire at every point. That meant further support of Austria against Germany, as Berlin was increasingly supportive of Constantinople. It meant Russian support for the Balkan states of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro that were fighting Turkey in a series of wars around 1910. It meant encouraging Italy to wrest control of Tripoli from the Ottomans in 1911. The crisis came in the summer of 1914, when Austria threatened Serbia and Russia decided to give all out-support to Serbia. In a matter of days that led to war between Russia and France against Germany and Austria. Britain and the Ottoman Empire joined in, and the Russian army did very poorly on the Eastern front. The two empires fought each other for the last time during World War I. the war ended with the regimes of both empires being overthrown.[2]

The Republic Monument (1928) at Taksim Square in Istanbul, crafted by Pietro Canonica. The people standing behind Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, include Semyon Ivanovich Aralov, Ambassador of the Russian SFSR in Ankara during the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922).[3] His presence in the monument, ordered by Atatürk, points out to the financial and military aid sent by Vladimir Lenin in 1920, during the war.[3]

The Ottoman government was party to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed between the bolshevik government of Russia and the Central Powers on March 3, 1918; the treaty became obsolete later the same year. Russian bolsheviks and the Soviet government headed by Vladimir Lenin, who emerged victorious from the Russian Civil War by 1921, viewed the Turkish revolutionary (national) movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal as friendly, and Lenin's government abdicated the traditional claims of the Russian Empire to the territories of Western Armenia and the Straits. The Soviet supply of gold and armaments to the Kemalists in the Turkish War of Independence in 1920–1922 was a key factor in the latter's successful power grab in an Ottoman Empire defeated by the Triple Entente and their victory in the Armenian campaign and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22).[4]

Ottoman postcard of the Russian Embassy's summer residence in the Büyükdere neighbourhood of Istanbul, on the Bosphorus. The main building of the Russian Embassy (since 1923 the Russian Consulate) is on İstiklal Avenue in the Beyoğlu (Pera) district.

The house inhabited by Leon Trotsky (1929–1933) in Büyükada Island near Istanbul

Soviet stamp of Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, who died in Moscow and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was the second state to formally recognize the Kemalist government of Turkey with the Treaty of Moscow signed on 16 March 1921 between the RSFSR's Lenin government and the government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (the Sultanate was still nominally in existence). Under the Treaty of Moscow,[5] the two governments undertook to establish friendly relations between the countries; Article VI of the Treaty declared all the treaties theretofore concluded between Russia and Turkey to be null and void. The Treaty of Moscow was followed by an identical Treaty of Kars signed in October 1921 by the Kemalists with Soviet Armenia, Soviet Azerbaijan and Soviet Georgia, which formed part of the Soviet Union after the December 1922 Union Treaty.

After being exiled from the Soviet Union in February 1929, Leon Trotsky arrived in Istanbul and lived for nearly four years (1929–1933) at a house in Büyükada Island, the largest of the Prince Islands in the Sea of Marmara, to the southeast of Istanbul.

The first serious tensions in the countries' bilateral relations emerged during the negotiations that led to the signing of the Montreux Convention in July 1936, when Turkey regained control over the Straits which it was allowed to remilitarize.[6]

While Turkey officially remained neutral during World War II until 23 February 1945, the USSR viewed Turkey's continued relationship with Germany, whose warships were allowed passage through the Straits,[7] as inimical to itself.[7] On 19 March 1945, the USSR's Foreign Minister Molotov advised Turkey's ambassador in Moscow that the USSR was unilaterally withdrawing from the 1925 Non-Aggression pact;[8] the decision was explained by asserting that "due to the deep changes that had occurred especially during World War II" the treaty did not cohere with "the new situation and needed serious improvement."[9] The Turkish government was subsequently informed by Molotov that in addition to bases in the Straits, the Soviet Union also claimed a part of eastern Turkey, which was assumed to refer to the districts of Kars, Artvin and Ardahan, which the Russian Empire (and the short-lived Democratic Republic of Armenia) had held between 1878 and 1921.[10]

At the Potsdam Conference (July 1945), Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin demanded a revision of the Montreux Convention; the Soviet demand that the USSR should be allowed to join in the defence of the Straits was rejected by Turkey, with the backing of the West.[10] In March 1947, with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine, the US underwrote the frontiers of Turkey (as well as Greece) and the continued existence of non-communist governments in the two countries.[10] Turkey sought aid from the United States and joined NATO in 1952. The USSR and Turkey were in different camps during the Korean War and throughout the Cold War.

On 24 November 2015, within weeks of the start of the Russian military intervention in support of Syria′s President Bashar al-Assad, Turkish F-16 combat aircraft shot down a Russian Su-24 during an airspace dispute close to the Turkish-Syrian border. Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incident as "a stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists" and further stated that "today's tragic events will have significant consequences including for relations between Russia and Turkey".[15]

In response, Russia imposed a number of economic sanctions on Turkey. These included the suspension of visa-free travel to Russia for Turkish citizens, limits on Turkish residents and companies doing business in Russia and restrictions on imports of Turkish products.[16] Russian tour operators were discouraged from selling Turkish package holidays and asked to stop charter flights to Turkey[16] while Russian football clubs were banned from signing Turkish players and discouraged from organizing winter training camps in Turkey.[17] The day after the jet was shot down, a Russian law-maker, Sergei Mironov, introduced a bill to the Russian parliament that would criminalize the denial of the Armenian Genocide,[18] a political move that Turkey has strongly opposed when countries like France and Greece adopted similar laws.[19]

The Pan-Orthodox Council, which had been originally scheduled to be held in Istanbul′s Hagia Irene in 2016 had to be shifted to Crete, Greece, after the Russian Orthodox Church indicated that it did not want to go to Turkey due to the crisis between the two countries following the downing of the Russian jet.[20][21][22][23]

The process of normalisation of ties between the two countries was started in June 2016 with Recep Erdoğan expressing regret to Putin for the downing of the Russian warplane.[24] Putin and Erdogan held a telephone conversation on 29 June which was described as being productive by Russian and Turkish government officials. The Russian government later lifted the travel restrictions on Russian citizens visiting Turkey and ordered normalisation of trade ties.[25]

On 9 August 2016, the countries′ leaders held a meeting in St Petersburg, Russia, which was described by a commentator as a ″clear-the-air summit″ — the first time the pair met since they fallout over the Russian fighter jet downing by the Turkish air force as well as Erdoğan’s first trip abroad since the failed coup attempt in Turkey.[26] The BBC commented that the summit, at which Erdoğan thanked Putin for his swift support during the coup attempt, ″unnerved the West″.[27]

Following the assassination of Russian ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov on 19 December 2016, the countries′ leaders sought to contain any possible damage to relations between the two countries.[28] [29] In December 2016, the two countries initiated the Astana peace talks on Syria peace settlement, subsequently, along with Iran, agreeing to create de-escalation zones in Syria.[30][31][32]

On 31 May 2017, Russia lifted most of the sanctions it had imposed on Turkey, which includes lifted restrictions on Turkish companies operating in Russia and ended a ban on employing Turkish workers in the country. It also ended an embargo on a range of Turkish imports. President Putin also restored a bilateral agreement on visa-free movement between the two countries.[33]

During Putin′s visit to Ankara at the end of September 2017, the Turkish and Russian presidents said they agreed to closely cooperate on ending Syria’s civil war.[34] Vladimir Putin′s visit to Ankara in December that year was the third face-to-face meeting between the countries′ leaders in less than a month and their seventh in a year.[35][36]

In June 2018, the Russian government-controlled news agency Sputnik, shut down its website in Kurdish language without mentioning any particular reason for the decision. Former employees of Sputnik said that the news agency decided to shut it down at Turkey’s request.[37]

In mid-August 2018, Russia and Turkey backed one another in their respective disputes with the United States. Russia condemned U.S. sanctions against Turkey over the detention of Andrew Brunson,[38] while Turkey stated its opposition to U.S. sanctions on Russia over the annexation of Crimea and interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.[39][40][41]

In addition, Turkey and Russia also shared foreign policy on the Venezuelan presidential crisis in January 2019, supporting the regime of Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate government of Venezuela, opposing Western-supported opposition government led by Juan Guaidó.[42]

Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu stated that Turkey was not going to have to choose between Russia and the United States.[43]

• (in English, Russian, and Turkish) Embassy of Russia in Ankara
• (in Turkish) Embassy of Turkey in Moscow
• (in Russian) Consulate-General of Russia in Antalya
• (in English, Russian, and Turkish) Consulate-General of Russia in Istanbul
• (in Russian and Turkish) Consulate-General of Russia in Trabzon
• (in Turkish) Consulate-General of Turkey in Kazan
• (in Turkish) Consulate-General of Turkey in Saint Petersburg