NATO, something is moving. At least according to the Turkish Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of the key Islamic country in the Mediterranean – because it is wedged between Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia – as well as the second strongest army in the Atlantic Alliance. And speaking of muscle power, Erdogan has just clarified a key point about the road map towards peace in Ukraine: “Turkey’s support for the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine remains unshakeable,” he declared yesterday in a video message sent to the summit of the International Platform of Crimea, the peninsula disputed between Kiev and Moscow.
But above all, the Turkish president – who has spent a lot of time in negotiations between the warring parties, although without great results – has clarified that “the return of Crimea to Ukraine is a requirement of international law”. This is not an unprecedented fact, but certainly a statement of great importance.
As is known, Moscow has controlled Crimea since February 20, 2014 – February again – when, with a coup and an army of “little green men” (armed militias without military insignia) in the pay of the Kremlin, it formed the so-called “self-defense of Crimea” and took possession of the buildings of the institutions, the casemates and the military bases, to signify that there was no going back. In fact, immediately afterwards Moscow held a referendum for the annexation (which ended in a plebiscite in its favor), while along the coast the Black Sea fleet kept a threatening watch, before anchoring in Sevastopol.
All this under the astonished eyes of the rest of the Ukrainian people and with the complicity of the puppet president Viktor Yanukovych, at the time already in serious difficulty because he was dealing with Euromaidan, an armed popular uprising that, from the squares of Kiev, loudly demanded his removal. February 20 was also the bloodiest day of the protest: the demonstrators marched towards the Government and Parliament Building, and obtained from Yanukovych an agreement that provided for early elections and the establishment of a Government of National Unity.
It didn’t happen that way: two days later, on February 22, Vladimir Putin called the military high command and security chiefs to discuss the “liberation” of Yanukovych and the “return of Crimea to Russia.” That same day, the Ukrainian president boarded a helicopter and fled to Russia, while the people stormed the buildings of power. The rest we know: since then, the disputed Crimea has been in Russian hands, and exactly eight years later the invasion of Donbass marked the beginning of the most devastating fratricidal war in Eastern Europe since the Second World War.
But the outcome of the war this time is not a foregone conclusion: despite Putin’s hopes of repeating in Kiev the coup he achieved with complete success in Crimea, things went differently. To the point that Russia itself suffered a theft of territory, in the Kursk region. One that will soon be talked about again when, at least according to Erdogan, they will sit down again to negotiate de-escalation.
The news is that the statements of the Turkish president would have made an impression on the Kremlin, which always listens with interest to what the very shrewd Turkish leader has to “offer”. It was the presidential office itself, through spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who made it known that Vladimir Putin could hold a meeting with Erdogan as part of the BRICS summit that will be held in the Russian city of Kazan from 22 to 24 October.
Ankara, in fact, continues to follow the “two-oven policy”: on the one hand, it has officially confirmed that it wants to join the BRICS, the organization of “emerging economies” led by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping that – together with Brazil, China, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Russia and South Africa – intends to compete with the excessive power of the international economic system tied to the US dollar, to undermine and then replace the hegemony of the West (Turkey is the first NATO country to ask to join the BRICS). On the other hand, it supports the Atlanticist plan and echoes Washington, which intends to free Ukraine from the Russian yoke at any cost, by force or negotiations.
As with the civil war in Syria, Erdogan has never wanted or sought a direct clash with Russia. But when it came to pursuing its own interests, Turkey took over the northwestern region of Idlib, where Russian forces were maneuvering in support of Damascus to reconquer the country threatened by the Islamic State. There in Syria, Erdogan had a precise and direct objective: to wrest the northwestern provinces from the Syrians to create a security buffer zone at the expense of the Kurds, whose statelessness makes them a constant threat to Turkish (and Syrian) territorial integrity, given that the Kurds would like to create an independent state, Kurdistan, right on the Turkish border.
As for Crimea, here too the objective is geopolitical and refers to the historical Turkish control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, that is, to guaranteeing tranquility in the Black Sea in opposition to Russia itself, which since the time of the Tsars has sought access to the “warm seas” in order to play a leading role in the Mediterranean and threaten Europe.
The last time Turkey (or rather the Ottoman Empire, which Erdogan is trying to revive) opposed Russia was in 1853: at the time, Constantinople, supported by France and Great Britain (with the support of a Piedmontese expeditionary force), declared war on the Russians and besieged Sevastopol, the largest Russian port on the Black Sea. The Crimean War ended in 1856 with the Paris Peace Congress which led to the demilitarization of the Black Sea and the relative loss of the Russian fleet, with Moscow also having to cede Bessarabia (now Moldavia).
This is to say that the roots of what is happening today in Crimea are the same as then: Turkey and Russia still reason according to the logic of empire and both, although economic partners, have diametrically opposed and irreconcilable strategic and military objectives. This is why, ultimately, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s stance is good news for peace in Ukraine. The Turkish leader is in the process of rapprochement with the European Union, with which he shares not only support for Kiev but also the will to resolve the issue of the customs union with the EU, the disputes related to the maritime border between Greece and Turkey, as well as the issue of the division of the island of Cyprus to which the offshore deposits off the coast of Cyprus and Israel are attached.
All these issues are worth much more than support for the Russian Federation, whose condition increasingly resembles the proverbial winner’s bandwagon that one would like to jump on. While Ankara has everything to gain from peace and a diminished negotiating power of Moscow.
