Turkey’s effort to maintain diplomatic, commercial and military ties to Russia while doing the same with Ukraine, a country at war with Russia for almost a decade, has been one of the most precarious balancing acts of statecraft in recent memory.
An A400M aircraft arrives in Kayseri, Turkey, on Dec. 20, 2022.
“Erdogan and Putin are enemies, but they’re enemies who deal with each other and are happier and more comfortable dealing with each other than with anyone else,” James F. Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, told Yahoo News. More surprisingly, it has been largely successful.
The signature Turkish weapons system first sent in 2019 and throughout the war has been the cost-effective and combat-proven small unmanned aerial vehicle Bayraktar TB2, of which Ukraine is now believed to have a 50-strong fleet. And they continued well after the Russian invasion last year, being delivered by ground convoy from the Polish border into western Ukraine. These deliveries continue to the present day.
While nominally a private company, Baykar Tech has intimate connections with the Erdogan government and the ruling Justice and Development Party, also known as AKP, with Selçuk Bayraktar, the younger brother of Baykar CEO Haluk Bayraktar and a key figure in the company, being married to Erdogan’s daughter Sümeyye Erdogan, herself a former aide to her father’s party.
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