Russia–Turkey relations are the bilateral relations between Russia and Turkey and their antecedent states. They are both countries with territory in Europe and Asia. Relations between the two are rather cyclical. From the late 16th until the early 20th centuries, relations between the Ottoman and Russian empires were normally adverse and hostile and the two powers were engaged in numerous Russo-Turkish wars, one of the longest series of wars in modern history. Russia attempted to extend its influence in the Balkans and gain control of the Bosphorus at the expense of the weakening Ottoman Empire. As a result, the diplomatic history between the two powers was extremely bitter and acrimonious up to World War I. However, in the early 1920s, as a result of the Bolshevik Russian government's assistance to Turkish revolutionaries during the Turkish War of Independence, the governments' relations warmed. Relations again turned sour at the end of WWII as the Soviet government laid territorial claims and demanded other concessions from Turkey. Turkey joined NATO in 1952 and placed itself within the Western alliance against the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, when relations between the two countries were at their lowest level. Relations began to improve the following year, when the Soviet Union renounced its territorial claims after the death of Stalin.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, relations between Turkey and Russia improved significantly and the two countries came to rank among each other's largest trade partners. Russia became Turkey's largest provider of energy, while many Turkish companies began to operate in Russia. In the 1990s, Turkey became the top foreign destination for Russian tourists.
However, both countries still stand on opposite ends when it comes to foreign policy, especially in tense issues such as the Syrian civil war, the Kosovo conflict, Libyan conflict, and have opposing views on the Armenian genocide and Bosnian genocide. Relations were tense following the Russian fighter jet shootdown in November 2015, becoming normalised again in 2016. As a close partner of both Russia and Ukraine, Turkey is actively attempting to broker a peaceful solution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and has hosted a number of high-profile negotiations between the two countries. Turkey is currently the only NATO member which is not on Russia's unfriendly countries list.
Turkey's foreign policy is marked by strategic autonomy in an era of multipolarity. Russia and Turkey have created a durable model of "cooperative rivalry": they compete militarily and geopolitically in several theaters, like Libya, Syria, while maintaining enough political and economic cooperation, for example in tourism and energy, to make the relationship beneficial for both sides, even after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Early history
Slavic and Turkic peoples have been in contact for centuries along the Eurasian Steppe, especially the Volga. Medieval Turkic kingdoms like Khazaria, Cumania, Volga Bulgaria, the Golden Horde, 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.
Both early predecessors Oghuz Yabgu Khaganate even form alliance ties with East Slav principalities.
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 conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by 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.
Clashes of empires
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 (1768–1774) 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 behalf of the Eastern Orthodox Christian populations. By the 19th century, Russia was aiding 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.
For brief moments, The Russo-Ottoman alliance was established during the turbulent years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It was primarily a defensive agreement between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, designed to counterbalance the growing French influence in the region. The first treaty was signed on January 3, 1799 (attempting December 23, 1798), and included secret clauses supporting mutual defense against France. The alliance was complemented shortly after by an Anglo-Ottoman alliance, all aiming to curtail Napoleon’s expansion. The Russo-Ottoman cooperation helped end the French occupation of strategic territories like the Ionian Islands, particularly Corfu, which secured the islands from French control and led to the establishment of the Septinsular Republic under joint Russian and Turkish protectorates. This marked a rare instance of Orthodox Greek self-government since Byzantine era. However, the alliance was fragile and influenced by shifting power dynamics. After France defeated Russia in the War of the Third Coalition, the Ottoman Empire reconsidered its alliances. Sultan Selim III refused to ratify the renewed treaty in 1805, and by 1806 relations deteriorated, with Russia’s naval access blocked in the Turkish Straits. This led to renewed hostilities and the confrontation Russo-Ottoman War of 1806–1812. Another attempt is the Russo-Ottoman alliance of 1833, was an defensive agreement in which the Ottoman Empire sought Russian support against Egyptian expansion, establishing a temporary strategic partnership between two traditional rivals. During Oriental Crisis, By the late 1830s, tensions resurfaced when Muhammad Ali of Egypt again clashed with the Ottoman central authority, this time threatening Ottoman control in Syria. France supported Ali, while Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia formed a coalition to preserve the Ottoman Turkey’s integrity territory. Russo-Turkish relations continued until broke down, effectively ended in culminating Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire being on opposite sides in the Crimean War.
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 Russian Caucasus campaign started on 1 November 1914 with the Russian invasion of Turkish Armenia. In February 1917, the Russian advance was halted following the Russian Revolution. The Russian Caucasus Army soon disintegrated and was replaced by the forces of the newly established Armenian state. The war ended with the regimes of both empires being overthrown.
Soviet Union and Turkey
Friendship during the interbellum
The Soviet Union and the new Turkish governments were outsiders to the great powers and gravitated toward each other after World War I. According to Onur Işçi:
Beginning in 1920, bitterness against the postwar international order drove Soviet-Turkish relations. Nationalist Turks and internationalist Bolsheviks laid to rest four centuries of rivalry between their imperial predecessors as they found themselves in a convergence that each side defined as anti-imperialist. At the heart of their cooperation was a geopolitical alignment that sought to shield the greater Black Sea region from Western intrusions. .... All the way up to the final hours of peace in 1939, the first principle that guided Turkish diplomacy was good neighborly relations with Moscow in the context of friendship rather than subordination.
The Ottoman government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Bolshevik government of Russia and the Central Powers on 3 March 1918, but it became obsolete later that year. Russian Bolsheviks and the Soviet government were led by Vladimir Lenin, who emerged victorious from the Russian Civil War by 1921 and viewed the Turkish revolutionary (national) movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as congenial to their ideological and geopolitical aspirations. Lenin's government abdicated the traditional claims of the Russian Empire to the territories of Western Armenia and the Turkish straits.
The Soviet supply of gold and armaments to the Kemalists in 1920 to 1922 was a key factor in the latter's successful takeover of the Ottoman Empire, which had been defeated by the Triple Entente but won the Armenian campaign (1920) and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922).
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was the first state that formally recognised the Kemalist government of Turkey in March 1921 after the Republic of Armenia which signed the Treaty of Alexandropol with the Turkish revolutionaries on 2 December 1920. The Treaty of Moscow, signed on 16 March 1921 between Lenin's government and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey government (although the Sultanate was still nominally in existence), followed bilateral treaties that the Moscow government concluded with Persia and Afghanistan earlier that year (apart from those with the states on the territory of the former Russian Empire).
Under the 1921 Treaty of Moscow, the two governments undertook to establish friendly relations between the countries. Under Article II, Turkey ceded Batum and the adjacent area north of the village of Sarp to the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (Kars Oblast went to Turkey). Article III instituted an autonomous Nakhchivan oblast under Soviet Azerbaijan's protectorate. Article V had the parties agree to delegate the final elaboration of the status of the Black Sea and the Turkish Straits to a future conference of delegates of the littoral states if the "full sovereignty" and security of Turkey and "her capital city of Constantinople" were not injured. 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 Treaty on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
On 16 December 1925, the Turkish government withdrew its delegation, which let the League of Nations Council grant a mandate for the disputed region of Mosul to Britain without its consent. Kemal countered the diplomatic reverse by concluding a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on 17 December. The pact was later amended and prolonged and then was prolonged again for another ten years on 7 November 1935.
The key episode was agreement on the Montreux Convention in July 1936 in which Turkey regained control over the Straits, which it was allowed to remilitarise.
In parallel to the fluctuating bilateral relations, the communist leaders, party functionaries, diplomats and scholars paid close attention to the origins, evolution and transformational phases of Kemalism.
World War II and postwar
Turkey officially remained neutral during World War II until 23 February 1945, but the Soviets viewed the Turkish continued relationship with Nazi Germany, whose warships were allowed passage through the Straits, as inimical to itself. On 19 March 1945, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov advised Turkey's ambassador in Moscow that the Soviets were unilaterally withdrawing from the 1925 Non-Aggression Pact. 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". 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 First Republic of Armenia) had held between 1878 and 1921.
At the Potsdam Conference (July 1945), Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin demanded a revision of the Montreux Convention. The Soviets' demand to be allowed to join in the defense of the Straits was rejected by Turkey, with the backing of the West. In March 1947, with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine, the United States underwrote the frontiers of Turkey (as well as Greece) and the continued existence of non-communist governments in the two countries. Turkey sought aid from the United States and joined NATO in 1952. The Soviet Union and Turkey were in different camps during the Korean War and throughout the Cold War.
1990–present
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia was now a much smaller non-Communist nation. Relations improved and on 25 May 1992, a visit to Moscow by Turkish Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel saw the signing of a Russian-Turkish treaty.
Disagreements regarding the border dispute over the Caucasus and support of each other's historic adversaries both linger. However both countries are key strategic partners in the Transcaucasian region.