Geopolitically, Turkey is a game-changer. Without Turkey being a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the transatlantic Alliance would have had a truly different “mapping” of its surrounding environment. Such a “different mapping” would, quite negatively, pertain to a broad array of agendas, ranging from anti-ISIS operations to the Black Sea correlation of forces and the ability to pursue crisis management operations beyond NATO’s frontiers.
Within only a few years, between 2015 and 2019, Ankara has been transformed from being the main reason behind Russia’s anti-access/area denial weapon systems deployments to Syria—including the S-400 strategic surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems—into, strikingly, the one and only NATO nation that procured a Russian strategic weapon in the aftermath of Moscow’s 2014 aggression in Crimea. Since then, Turkey has become the primary armed drone seller to the Ukrainian military with a recent combat record in Donbas. This drastic swing is making things much more difficult for analysts and policymakers. The Ukrainian drone strikes in Donbas and Turkish unmanned systems mushrooming in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus have further complicated Turkish-Russian relations.
The Turkish Armed Forces remain one of the most “dronized” militaries within NATO. In Francis Fukuyama’s words, with the lessons learned from the Syrian, Libyan and Karabakh theaters, “it seems Turkey’s use of drones is going to change the nature of land power in ways that will undermine existing force structures, in the way that the Dreadnought obsoleted earlier classes of battleships, or the aircraft carrier made battleships themselves obsolete at the beginning of World War II.” More importantly, resembling the Israeli-Arab wars during the Cold War, the Syrian, Libyan and Karabakh fronts have visibly showcased the superiority of Turkish robotic warfare solutions over Soviet- and Russian-manufactured conventional arms.
The Turkish administration does not only sells drones in an off-the-shelf fashion. Instead, Turkey sparks drone warfare ecosystems abroad, cementing its alliances through robotic warfare transactions. Some critical episodes, in this respect, have taken place in Russia’s area of strategic interests.
This report will first address the leading drivers and visible patterns in Turkish-Russian relations, with a specific focus on the Black Sea. Subsequently, it will analyze the geopolitics of “the Turkish way of drone warfare.” Then, the report explains how Turkey’s defense transactions in the robotic warfare sector affect Ankara’s ties with Moscow. Finally, the work will conclude with its findings.
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