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Turkey’s Black Sea Policies (1991–2023)
and Changing Regional Security Since
the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Mustafa Aydın
1 Introduction
The Black Sea has witnessed conflictual relations for centuries. However, changes
after the end of the Cold War allowed for the emergence of a cooperative environ-
ment, albeit briefly, prompting a gradual shift amongst the regional countries, except
Russia, towards Western political and economic space (Aydın, 2005, p. 57). Amongst
the regional countries, Turkey, already a Western-aligned Cold War veteran, bene-
fited from the weakening of the Russian power at the end of the Cold War and
the gravitation of regional countries away from the Russian influence. These move-
ments allowed Turkey to play a more significant role in the broader Black Sea region,
including the Balkans in the west and the Caucasus in the east. Both regions also
witnessed centuries-long competition between Czarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey.
Beyond geopolitics, if the region is integrated into the global economy, Turkey
could be presented with increasing economic benefits due to its location at the
gateway between the two ends of Eurasia. It links the EU, the world’s largest market
in the West, and China, the engine of global economic growth in the East. Benefiting
from its connection to NATO and the EU, Turkey could present itself early on as a
conduit between the regional countries and the world, guiding them towards integra-
tion with the broader world. This intention was clear in its earliest regional initiative,
creating the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Initiative, later Organisation (BSEC).
Turkey also benefited from weakening the Russian military presence on its
borders. The gradual withdrawal of Russian land forces from Caucasia removed a
centuries-long land-based threat on its north-eastern border. However, later conflicts
in the region and the return of Russian border guards to the Armenia-Turkey border
continued to irritate Turkey. Similarly, the division of the former Soviet Black Sea
M. Aydın (B
)
Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: maydin@khas.edu.tr
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024
K. Kakachia et al. (eds.), Security Dynamics in the Black Sea Region, Contributions to
International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62957-0_9
97
98 M. Aydın
Fleet (BSF) between Russia and Ukraine, the inability of Russia to keep up the main-
tenance of its navy, and its loss of easy access to deep-sea harbours in the region
presented an opportunity for Turkey to overtake Russia in the Black Sea as the most
important naval power. All these gave Turkey a unique chance at the end of the Cold
War to reverse the centuries-long weakness against the Russian maritime supremacy
in the Black Sea since the latter took control of Crimea in 1783.
Beyond the historical legacy of shifting control of the Black Sea from Ottoman/
Turkish dominance to Russian/Soviet supremacy, causing several wars in its wake,
the Black Sea represents exceptional geopolitical importance for Turkey as it still
controls southern access to the sea, which elevates its strategic value to international
actors, including Russia and the US (Aydın & Kaptanoğlu, 2007). Controlling the
Straits zone (The Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus) allows Turkey
to control both Russian access to the Mediterranean and the non-littoral states’ access
to the Black Sea, thereby granting it a role to regulate both regions. It also enhances
Turkey’s significance for regional geopolitics and security.
Western attention towards the Black Sea became particularly pronounced in the
wake of the September 2001 attacks in the US. As the wider Black Sea region
provided northern access t o the broader Middle East and North Africa (Asmus,
2004), Washington moved to extend its presence in the region, arguing that it had
become a stakeholder with vital interests in the Black Sea (Asmus & Jackson, 2004).
While Russia became increasingly agitated against what it saw as the infringement of
the West in its “near abroad” (Kubicek, 2000, p. 547), Turkey, too, showed its unease
in the face of increasing US military presence in the region as it came to consider this
as a destabilising factor.1 As the Western influence in the region gradually expanded,
the Russian response was to intensify its connection with dissatisfied minorities in
regional countries and to prop up groups friendly towards Russia in the so-called
frozen conflict zones. The first showdown of the heightened tension was in Georgia
in August 2008; then came Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022.
As a strategically located middle-power country with aspirations for regional
influence, Turkey did not appreciate the Black Sea region turning into a scene of
a great-power rivalry (Aydın, 2012) and opted for what it termed the “third way”
(Aydın, 2009), emphasising regional ownership and multilateral cooperation. With
this, Turkey hoped to contain Russian aggression and Western encroachment into
the region. However, the Russian resurgence since the late 2000s endangered these
attempts and paralysed multilateral cooperation while heightening regional threat
perceptions. This then weakened the regional ownership rhetoric.
The Black Sea security scene has increasingly militarised in recent years, and rudi-
mentary regional security structures—developed since the end of the Cold War with
significant political investment from Turkey—have dissipated. The projection and
hopeful agenda put forward by Turkey at the beginning of the 1990s failed to produce
a stabilised, secure and prosperous region with Turkey at the helm. While significant
changes have occurred in regional geopolitics since 2008, Turkey has been busy
1 Based on the author’s conversations with Turkish policymakers who have dealt with the region
over the years.
Turkey’s Black Sea Policies (1991–2023) and Changing Regional … 99
recalibrating its relations with Russia, going beyond the Black Sea. Nevertheless,
the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has since strained Turkey’s policies, forcing
it to reassess its approach to the wider Black Sea. Accordingly, this chapter will first
examine the fundamental parameters and priorities of Turkey’s Black Sea policies
since the end of the Cold War. It will then investigate its changing regional security
perception since 2008. Finally, the evaluation of Turkey’s policies and positions since
the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022 will be presented.
2 Turkey’s Black Sea Policies and Priorities
Turkey initiated the BSEC in 1992 and continuously supported various regional
cooperation initiatives throughout the 1990s and 2000s as an alternative to possible
regional power competition (Aydın, 2009). This continued until the invasion of
Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 made all such attempts impossible. The primary
intention of Turkey in creating the BSEC was to construct a multilateral, regional
organisation where member countries learn to cooperate on functional areas. As there
was not much tradition of intra-regional cooperation and trade, the BSEC served as
a springboard where regional countries, some of which were locked in historical
hostilities, would experience the value of economic cooperation.
Another aspect of the Turkish initiative was to help its leadership bid in the broader
region from the Balkans to Central Asia by presenting itself as a model for newly
independent states for their economic and political transformations. The zone was
described as linking the old Silk Road to Europe while helping the regional countries
to adopt the requirements of the modern international system (Aydın, 2009).
Moreover, the BSEC was one of the earliest initiatives that brought NATO
members with former Warsaw Pact countries together in a region divided by power
struggles for centuries and separated by one of the main fault lines of the Cold
War. Its local ownership induced member countries towards cooperative behaviour
and regional identity creation during the 1990s (Aydın & Fazlıoğlu, 2007). While
Turkey’s initial vision was never fully realised, it served as a multinational venue
for the former Soviet bloc countries to adapt to global trading rules by transferring
know-how from the market economies of Greece and Turkey. It persuaded Russia,
which was also going through a painful transformation and suffering from a loss
of power after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to participate in negotiations with
former Soviet countries on an equal footing. This also helped to create a cooperative
mood in the region and reduced the possibility of spilling over various conflicts to
other countries.
However, it soon became clear that the member countries lacked the political will
to create a working regional security system. Although BSEC and other regional
initiatives generated a discussion on regional identity, this did not facilitate political
dialogue between conflicting countries, let alone region-wide security cooperation.
Although Turkey followed BSEC with more security-oriented cooperation schemes,
100 M. Aydın
such as the establishment of the Black Sea Naval Cooperation Task Group (Black-
SeaFor) in 2001 and Black Sea Harmony in 2004, these initiatives were not able
to prevent increasing competition and resurgent Russia’s military moves after 2008
(Custara & Danila, 2009). While Turkey still tried to withstand the decaying influ-
ences of armed conflicts and rising political tension, Russian revisionism in the 2000s
weakened all attempts for regional cooperation.
The changing security environment after the 9/11 attacks, Turkey’s increasing
turn to the Middle East after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, and growing tensions
between Russia and the EU/NATO led Turkey to move to a more nuanced policy
line in the Black Sea. As such, the Black Sea, for a time, lost its distinctive character
in Turkish foreign policy, requiring separate policies, and was subsumed into its
bilateral political relations with the littoral states. As a result, in contrast to the
1990s, during which Turkey’s Black Sea policy was made at the highest levels and
followed closely by President Turgut Özal, by the time of the 15th anniversary of
the BSEC in 2007, care of Black Sea affairs was relegated to the level of Deputy
Director General at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Security aspects were left to the
care of the Turkish Naval Command (Aydın & Fazlıoğlu, 2007). This was to change
gradually as Russian moves in the region between 2008 and 2014 brought it back
firmly into Turkey’s priority agenda.
In the meantime, one of the cornerstones of Turkey’s Black Sea policy in the 2000s
solidified: upholding the Montreux Convention of 1936, which recognised Turkish
sovereignty over the Straits region, thus controlling access to the Black Sea. From
the Turkish perspective, the centuries-long struggle between great powers of the day
over controlling the Straits had been one of the reasons for Ottoman weakening and
final collapse at the end of the First World War. Therefore, it was important for
republican Turkey to regain sovereign control, albeit with certain limitations, over
the Straits with Montreux Convention and avoid high-risk environments in the Black
Sea that might encourage other actors—certainly Russia in the north and perhaps
even Turkey’s NATO allies—to seek control over the Straits once again. It was, after
all, only by the end of the Second World War that the Allied countries—the US,
Britain and the Soviet Union—discussed the control of the Straits at the Yalta and
Potsdam conferences (Aydın, 2021, pp. 13–14).
One of the often-overlooked aspects of the Montreux Convention is that it created
a unique passage regime, severely limiting the warships of non-littoral countries in
the Black Sea, thus allowing Soviet/Russian naval dominance in the region, which
instilled a feeling of security to the latter and stabilised the region after centuries of
confrontation (Baldıran et al., 2022;Oral,
2017). From the Turkish perspective, which
suddenly found itself commanding the naval scene in the Black Sea after centuries,
limiting the presence of non-littoral states, primarily the US, navies in the region
was seen as a precaution against inducing Russian threat perception. This policy
functioned until Russia started militarising the Black Sea with substantive investment
in its BSF from the mid-2000s onwards and replaced Turkey as the dominant navy
in the region by 2010 (Aydın, 2020;Çoşkun, 2024).
It should be mentioned here that the NATO countries favoured the Convention
during the Cold War because it limited the Soviet naval ability to shift forces to
Turkey’s Black Sea Policies (1991–2023) and Changing Regional … 101
the Mediterranean quickly. However, with the changing security dynamics, Bulgaria
and Romania brought about the possibility of relaxing the terms of the Conven-
tion for a more prominent US naval presence in the Black Sea. Turkey strongly
opposed these suggestions, fearing that this would corner Russia in the Black Sea,
forcing it to retaliate, thus turning the region into a zone of great-power competition.
Moreover, these suggestions, usually ignoring the legal and strategic aspects of the
debate, do not present a viable response to the question of what happens if Turkey
allows violations of the Convention, thus leading to the discontinuation of the treaty.
As the Convention uniquely provides for Turkish sovereignty over an international
waterway, it is unclear what benefits Turkey would get for foregoing its control over
the Straits, as the current international law foresees free access to international water-
ways, not national control. Besides weakening Turkey’s control over the Straits, this
kind of move would stimulate conditions for international rivalry, as witnessed from
the mid-seventeenth century until 1936, creating instability and threats to Turkey’s
security.
Thus, Turkey’s reservations about the US’s long-term objectives in the Black Sea
region differ from Russian opposition in motives and reasoning. For example, when
some countries suggested expanding NATO’s Operation Active Endeavour (OAE)
to the Black Sea, which was initiated by NATO in the Mediterranean in October
2001 to avert the movement of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction (Aydın,
2012; Blank, 2007), Russia’s opposition rested on its aversion to seeing an expansion
of Western influence in its neighbourhood. On the other hand, Turkey’s opposition
resulted from its concern about preserving the Montreux regime of the Straits and
the political and military balances that emerged in the Black Sea after the end of the
Cold War. Turkey, for example, does not oppose the expansion of NATO and the EU
to the Black Sea countries or strengthen the security forces of the NATO members in
the region; it only differs in bringing extra-regional naval forces to the Black Sea in
clear violation of the Montreux Convention. It thus created an alternative task force
in the Black Sea (Black Sea Harmony) in March 2004, offering to team up with the
Black Sea littoral states, three of which were NATO members and two were NATO’s
Partnership for Peace countries, to undertake the same mission as the OAE (Kır,
2005).
Russia joined Black Sea Harmony on 27 December 2006 and Ukraine on 17
January 2007. Others followed suit when the US signalled change in its Black Sea
politics in early 2007, giving up trying to send further naval forces to the region and
encouraging regional partners to join (Aydın & Fazlıoğlu, 2007). In the meantime,
Black Sea Harmony became affiliated with Operation Active Endeavour in September
2005 and started sharing the information it gathered with the NATO command in
Naples (Birsay, 2007, p. 106). Although the operation is currently conducted only
by Turkey in its territorial waters since other countries discontinued participating
after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Turkish Navy’s surveillance and reconnaissance
operations in the Black Sea still provide 67% of NATO’s recognised maritime picture
from the region (Güvenç & Aydın, 2023).
Although Turkey’s policies in the Black Sea are questioned by its partners and
allies in the region every time a crisis emerges, Turkey has consistently defended
102 M. Aydın
the status quo that occurred at the end of the Cold War and argued for preventing
the region from becoming a confluence of the Russia-West conflict, even if this
occasionally pits Turkey against its allies. At the same time, it has also advocated
the region’s integration into Euro-Atlantic structures and the strengthening of NATO
members and partner countries’ security forces since the early 1990s. While the
resulting status quo allowed Turkey to play a more significant regional role, it has
recently become a difficult position to maintain with the growing Russian challenge
and open aggression in the region.
3 Shifting Balances and Russian-Turkish Cooperation
in the Black Sea
A shared understanding of the benefits of compartmentalising their relations since the
end of the Cold War surrounds ever-expanding ties between Russia and Turkey. The
earlier preference to separate economics from political issues, including security
concerns, was evident in their multilateral cooperation in the Black Sea through
BSEC. Similar positions against non-littoral states in the Black Sea, reflecting their
compatible views about the regional balances, eventually led to a Russian-Turkish
economic-political condominium between the two largest coastal powers. Later, with
mutual port visits, naval exercises, the establishment of BlackSeaFor in 2001 and
Operation Black Sea Harmony in 2004, the relationship anticipated an informal
regional security system.
Nevertheless, these indicators of closer cooperation were yet to be fully institu-
tionalised when the Georgia-Russia War of 2008 challenged their premises. Though
Russia’s use of force for political gains did not sit well with Turkey, it chose an
expedient way out when it saw a weak Western response to the crisis and sought to
rebalance its relations with Russia in the Caucasus and the Black Sea. When Russia
first occupied and then annexed Crimea in 2014, Turkey’s reaction was still muted.
However, it saw that returning to the days of containing Russia within regional organ-
isations was no longer possible (Rüma & Çelikpala, 2019). While Russia suspended
its membership in BlackSeaFor after Turkey shot down its military plane over the
Turkish-Syrian border in 2015 (Tass, 2015), Turkey finally halted all its efforts for
regional cooperation after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The backbone of the Turkish-Russian understanding of the Black Sea security
has been the common position against the presence of non-littoral naval forces in
the region. From the Turkish perspective, the delicate balance that had emerged in
the region following the end of the Cold War needed to be protected. It wanted to
avoid alienating Russia and cornering it with the additional presence of extra-regional
powers. The tool most often used by Turkey to ensure this was the 1936 Montreux
Convention. This meant that Turkey’s position in the region differed from that of
its NATO allies (especially the US, Romania and Bulgaria) and regional partners
(e.g. Georgia and Ukraine). The acrimony between Turkey and its regional partners
Turkey’s Black Sea Policies (1991–2023) and Changing Regional … 103
became apparent in the early 2000s when the US wished to increase its presence in
the region after the 9/11 attacks, though subsided after 2007 when the US announced
that it had no intention of challenging the Montreux Convention and reduced its
activities in the region (Aydın, 2011, p. 526).
In general, Turkey recognised the geopolitical changes in the region since 9/11
and, accurately assessing Russia’s position on extending NATO to its borders, has
taken a middle position between its allies and its regional partner. While Turkey’s
long rivalry with Russia over the energy resources of the Caspian Basin was ending,
Turkey encountered problems with its application for EU membership, impacting its
relations with the West. Moreover, Turkey’s strategic interests in the Caucasus (and,
to a lesser extent, in the Black Sea) had diverged significantly from and occasionally
competed with those of its Western allies in the 2000s. All these contributed to
Turkish-Russian rapprochement or the “axis of the excluded” (Balta et al., 2021;
Hill & Taşpınar, 2006).
Since the annexation of Crimea, however, Russia has exceeded most expectations
by restoring its BSF and fortifying Crimea. Within a few years of the annexation,
Russia became the most powerful naval force in the region (Delanoë, 2014; Schneider,
2017). It controlled several exclusion zones around the Black Sea and the Caucasus
and used its BSF to support its newly created Mediterranean naval task force and
Syrian bases—effectively encircling Turkey. The strategic impact of this develop-
ment on Turkey’s regional reach from the Caucasus to the Eastern Mediterranean
has led to some recalibration of Turkey’s posture towards Russia. While an imperfect
balance had emerged in the Caucasus after the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, the
new lines drawn by Crimea and subsequent Russian moves in Ukraine required a
reassessment of Turkey’s position at a time when its centre of gravity had shifted to
the Levant, where Turkey felt it needed Russian presence to balance its increasingly
acrimonious relations with the US.
Although Russia’s militarisation of the Black Sea and advances in the Mediter-
ranean (Syria in the east and Libya in the west) worry Turkey, its frustration with US
policies continues to drive Ankara to work closely with Russia (Rumelili & Çelik,
2017). The cooperation of the US in Syria with the Syrian Democratic Forces, which
is affiliated with the PKK—classified as a terrorist organisation by the US and the
EU—leads to a strong “sense of betrayal” in Turkey (Neset et al., 2021, p. 12). The
alienating impact of this connection on Turkey is enormous. It continuously feeds
into Turkey’s attempt at using Russia to counterweight the US in Syria, even over-
riding Turkey’s uneasiness over Russian aggression in Ukraine. From the Turkish
perspective, in a nutshell, the future of Syria and the US connection to the Kurdish
groups are categorised as “existential”, while the Russia-Ukraine War is seen as a
“regional security problem”. This prioritisation then impacts Turkey’s wider relations
with the US, Russia and connected issues.
Nevertheless, this does not mean Turkey is happy with the increased Russian pres-
ence in its neighbourhood. Thus, while Russia has become a valuable counterweight
for Turkey against American positions in Syria, alloying part of its existential threat
perceptions, Turkey has not shied away from confronting Russian-backed forces in
various theatres from Syria and Libya in the south to the Caucasus and Ukraine in
104 M. Aydın
the north (Aydın, 2024). In this context, Turkey and Russia have developed a rela-
tionship of “competitive cooperation”, whereby they cooperate in various regions
to advance their interests against third parties while simultaneously competing with
and challenging each other when their interests clash (Aydın, 2024).
4 Impact of the Russia-Ukraine War
While the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War ended in rebalancing Russia and Turkey
in the Caucasus, the subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022
forced Turkey to reassess its position in the wider Black Sea region. While Turkey
found itself in a difficult position between its regional partners, Russia and Ukraine,
as well as between Russia and the West, the policies it pursued—supporting Ukraine
with weapons systems and condemning Russia while staying out of Western sanc-
tions against Russia—allow it to position itself to assume the role of a potential
mediator between the warring parties and increase its regional influence (Bechev,
2024). Conveying trilateral foreign ministers meeting with the Russian and Ukrainian
foreign ministers on 10 March 2022, in Antalya, followed by the fourth round of
ceasefire/peace talks on 14–17 March in Antalya and the fifth round on 29 March i n
Istanbul were some of the attempts by Turkey to end the conflict early on (Atlantic
Council, 2022). Later, brokering the “Grain Deal” in July 2022 with the involvement
of the UN (Bagirova, 2022; Interfax, 2022) showcased Turkey’s ability to sustain both
sides’ trust. Turkey has also benefitted from increased trade—though it has become
increasingly wary of transferring sanctioned dual-use goods (Akmenek et al., 2023;
Bechev, 2024; Jenkins, 2023)—and from its heightened profile as a producer of
successful unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on the international stage.
Having signed agreements to deepen its strategic partnership and enhance security
cooperation with Ukraine only a few days before the invasion (Isajiw, 2022), Turkey’s
first reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2024 was to enforce
the Montreux Convention to prevent widening of the conflict and limit its impact on
the regional security. Assessing the provisions of the Convention, Turkey declared
on 27 February, the third day of the conflict and before any other country to do so,
that the developments amounted to “war”, thus justifying the closure of the Turkish
Straits to warships of the warring parties under Article 19 of the Convention (Malsin,
2023). This made Turkey the first country to declare the Russian move as an act of
war (Güvenç & Aydın, 2023).
Moreover, Turkey, signalling that it was primarily concerned with regional secu-
rity, called on other countries to voluntarily refrain from sending warships to the
Black Sea and asked Russia not to recall the ships of its BSF that had remained
outside the Black Sea, although it had right to do so under the Montreux Convention
(Delanoë, 2024, p. 7). The reason given to Russia was that “this would be seen as
an escalation and would not be conducive” to regional security (Yinanç, 2023). It is
estimated that the number of Russian ships that belong to the BSF but are not in the
Black Sea is between 20 and 30. Five or six of these are Kalibr-capable platforms,
Turkey’s Black Sea Policies (1991–2023) and Changing Regional … 105
two of which are enhanced Kilo-class submarines (Güvenç, 2023). Although Turkey
has not activated Article 21 of the Convention, which allows it to prevent the passage
of any country’s warships through the Straits by declaring “Turkey is under the threat
of war”, its position was made clear to all countries and Turkey steadfastly refused
any third-party military ship passing through the Straits.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the continuation of the war and Russia’s
inability to subdue Ukraine have implications for Turkey’s assessment of Russia’s
military power and value to Turkey’s regional policies. Although it is beyond the
scope of this chapter to speculate on the impact of the war in Ukraine on Turkey’s
broader foreign policy stance, there are signs that Turkey is reassessing its emphasis
in recent years on s trategic autonomy in its foreign policy, which distanced it from its
Western allies, and several steps are underway. It has reached out to the United Arab
Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Greece, Armenia and the West in general—in
most cases accelerated after February 2022—and is on its way to normalising its
relations with most of them.
Regarding Russia, Turkey has agreed to all the resolutions proposed at NATO
since the invasion, particularly the 2022 Strategic Concept, which declared that “the
Russian Federation poses the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security”
(NATO, 2022). It ratified Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO (albeit belatedly)
for national and intra-Alliance reasons rather than to please Russia (Fraser, 2023).
Moreover, Turkey’s NATO-affiliated Rapid Deployable Corps, based in Istanbul,
became the designated NATO warfighting corps in December 2022 for contingen-
cies in 2023 (NATO, 2023), supplementing Turkey’s command of the Alliance’s Very
High Readiness Joint Task Force’s maritime component from June 2022 onwards.
This technically meant that Turkey would spearhead NATO’s response to any aggres-
sion towards the Alliance in its vicinity. The implication of this is straightforward,
as it is only from Russia that the Alliance expects possible aggression.
In addition, the Turkish Navy conducts continuous maritime reconnaissance in
the Black Sea and provides NATO with 67% of the regional picture it receives.
Turkey has also been sharing this information with Ukraine since the annexation of
Crimea (Yinanç, 2023). Furthermore, Turkish fighter jets are stationed in Romania
to participate in the NATO Enhanced Air Policing Mission against potential Russian
intrusions (NATO, 2023). Lastly, Turkey spearheaded an agreement with Romania
and Bulgaria on 11 January 2024 to establish the Mine Countermeasures Naval Group
in the Black Sea (MCM Black Sea), with the possibility of other NATO countries
joining the effort (Euronews, 2024).
Likewise, Turkey has remained resolute in its decision to keep the Straits closed
even though this is increasingly damaging to Russia as the war wore on due to
the wear and tear of its naval forces in the Black Sea and its inability to rotate
them (Güvenç & Aydın, 2023; Delanoë, 2024). This became particularly poignant
as Ukraine has damaged nearly a third of Russia’s BSF (Frian, 2024), including
its flagship, Moskva, in April 2022 (Dilanian et al., 2022). This development is
rapidly compromising Russia’s maritime supremacy in the Black Sea. Although
Russia is still able to rotate vessels from its Caspian Flotilla through the Volga-Don
Canal to the Black Sea, this is restricted by the number of ships that can be rotated
106 M. Aydın
without weakening its Caspian forces (Castillo, 2024;Coffey, 2023). Moreover, the
increased Ukrainian ability to hit Russian naval assets in the Black Sea has restricted
the activity area of Russia’s existing forces in the north-eastern part of the sea. All
these are changing the maritime balance in the Black Sea, propelling Turkey to the
first position again.
Turkey also increased and expanded its military support for Ukraine against
Russia. While its supply of weaponised UAVs to Ukraine since March 2019 put
Turkey ahead of most NATO members in providing Ukraine with lethal military
equipment, it has so far shied away from officially acknowledging the nature and
quantity of its military assistance to Ukraine and avoiding, until recently, to coor-
dinate with other NATO members. According to publicly available data, Turkey
has not only contracted to build four corvettes for the Ukrainian Navy but has also
supplied Ukraine with a range of other military equipment. This includes various
types of UAVs, air-to-surface munitions for UAVs, precision-guided missiles, guided
multiple rocket launchers (Soylu, 2022), over 600 heavy machine guns (Soylu, 2024),
mine-resistant armoured personnel carriers, ground and airborne electronic warfare
equipment (Janov, 2022), possibly T-155 Fırtına howitzers (Militarnyi, 2023), as well
as various types of mortars, ammunition, helmets and flak vests (Güvenç & Aydın,
2023). The ammunition supplied by Turkey includes 100,000 much-needed 155 mm
shells and critically needed 122 mm Soviet-standard artillery shells (Korshak, 2023).
It was also alleged, though rejected by Turkey, that it has been supplying cluster
munitions to Ukraine since November 2022 (Detsch & Gramer, 2023;Soylu,
2024).
Finally, the US Ambassador to Turkey has recently made public that the US Depart-
ment of Defense is cooperating with a Turkish firm to set up 155 mm munition
production lines in the US (Flake, 2024).
While available data suggests increasing support, it is difficult to pinpoint the total
value of the support as commercial sales are mixed with donations, and the Turkish
government does not release related figures. Nevertheless, the above-listed military
supplies and other policies of Turkey indicate that it heavily sides with Ukraine
except not participating in sanctions on Russia and avoiding heavy-handed language
in condemnation, though also clearly denouncing the use of force and occupation of
Ukrainian territory by Russia.
Ukraine has long figured prominently in Turkish strategic thinking as a counter-
weight to Russia in the Black Sea, and relations with Kyiv improved significantly after
Turkish F-16 s shot down a Russian bomber on the Turkey-Syria border in November
2015. Ties also deepened because Turkey turned to Ukraine when its Western partners
put an effective ban on sales of jet engines and other defence industry-related compo-
nents after Turkey’s incursions into northern Syria. Yet, Turkey does not perceive its
relations with its two Black Sea neighbours as mutually exclusive. Instead, Turkey
sees Ukraine as balancing Russia in the Black Sea and Russia as balancing the US
influence in the broader region.
Turkey’s Black Sea Policies (1991–2023) and Changing Regional … 107
5 Conclusion
Turkey has aimed to develop a regional security structure in the Black Sea capable
of keeping non-regional countries out of the basin while containing Russia within
regional multilateral institutions. Based on the equilibrium that emerged in the region
between Turkey and Russia after the end of the Cold War, various premises of this
strategy have been stretched to their limits since 2008 and severely damaged by the
latest war between Russia and Ukraine.
The Russian aggression against Ukraine put Turkey in a difficult spot. While
Turkey tried to limit the impact of war on regional balances and keep non-Black Sea
countries out of the region, which it managed so far in terms of the sea area, the
outbreak of conflict dealt a fatal blow to the post-Cold War regional security archi-
tecture and political-economic cooperation structures that Ankara had put together.
As none of the regional countries are willing to consider Russia a reliable inter-
locutor on any aspects of regional politics, let alone a partner in security affairs,
Turkey’s various regional multilateral initiatives, ranging from the economic sector
to security, have discontinued if not entirely disbanded. Their future will depend on
the outcome of the current war, Russia’s ability to reconcile with regional concerns,
and the willingness of the other regional countries to move ahead with perhaps a
reformed regional cooperation structure.
Although it is too early to assess the exact combined impact of all these factors
on Turkish-Russian relations and, by extension, Turkey’s Black Sea policies, there
is no doubt that they will have an effect after the war ends, if not before. Turkey
would ideally like an immediate cessation of hostilities and a return to the status quo
ante. Still, it would also prefer the current stalemate to a Russian victory despite the
upset to the regional political balance. A Russian victory would undoubtedly bring
back memories of centuries-old Russian/Soviet domination of the Black Sea, thus
prompting Turkey to develop counterbalancing partnerships. Ukraine will certainly
play a more prominent role in this search. At the same time, Turkey’s NATO allies
(Romania and Bulgaria) and partners (Georgia) in the region could become essential
parts of this strategy if they change their policy preference for enhanced US presence
in the region in favour of a regional partnership model Turkey prefers.
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Kornely Kakachia · Stephan Malerius ·
Stefan Meister
Editors
Security Dynamics
in the Black Sea Region
Geopolitical Shifts and Regional Orders
Editors
Kornely Kakachia
Department of Political Science
Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University
Tbilisi, Georgia
Stefan Meister
Center for Order and Governance
in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia
German Council on Foreign Relations
Berlin, Germany
Stephan Malerius
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung e.V.
Tbilisi, Georgia
ISSN 2731-5061 ISSN 2731-507X (electronic)
Contributions to International Relations
ISBN 978-3-031-62956-3 ISBN 978-3-031-62957-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62957-0
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