Posted on 03 Feb 2022
Turkey said it won’t back down from planned arms deals with Ukraine, including the possible sale of additional armed drones that’s drawn a rebuke from Russia.
Military cooperation between Ankara and Kyiv is not intended to target Russia and won’t be disrupted in order to please it, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s (pictured) communications director Fahrettin Altun said.
The remarks set the tone for Erdogan’s visit to Ukraine on Thursday (Feb 3), when he is expected to sign sweeping agreements with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, including a free trade deal.
A Nato power, Turkey has emerged as a key supporter of Ukraine in recent years, selling it dozens of Bayraktar TB2 drones, which Kyiv used for the first time last year in its breakaway Donbas region.
Turkey also remains a vocal critic of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, where it is concerned about the fate of Turkish communities. Closer ties saw a boom in bilateral trade but Turkey sees further strategic value in an improved relationship with Ukraine, a possible source of technology and knowhow for its growing defence industry.
Turkey has sought to leverage its ties by offering to mediate between Russia and Ukraine to defuse the latest border crisis between the two. Turkey might host Russia’s President Vladimir Putin following Erdogan’s Ukraine visit but the date of such a summit has yet to be decided, Altun said.
Russia’s military buildup to the east of Ukraine has increased concerns among Nato members that it could be preparing to invade. The Kremlin denies it has any such plans, but says it sees a rising risk that Ukraine will attack Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.
Erdogan has also managed to maintain close enough ties with Putin to anger some of Turkey’s Nato allies, including the U.S.
Erdogan’s decision in 2017 to purchase the S-400 air defence system from Russia resulted in US sanctions targeting Turkey’s defence industry, but didn’t persuade it to back down.
Altun said deals with Ukraine wouldn’t be any different.
“We’re not signing agreements for collaboration to target another country. Russia is among the first states to know that,” Altun told Bloomberg late Wednesday. “The deals we have made and the ones we’ll clinch with Ukraine aren’t directly linked to the current crisis.”
Turkey’s exports to Ukraine nearly doubled in five years to US$2.6 billion (RM10.88 billion) last year, while imports rose to US$4.4 billion from US$2.8 billion during the same period. The two countries now want to increase trade volume to US$10 billion a year. Turkish shipments to Ukraine last year were led by food textiles and machinery, including aircraft and land vehicles and steel and iron.
But there is more to the relationship than just exports. For Ukraine, the unmanned aircraft and the Turkish partnership are vital to defend its territory against Russia. Turkey, on the other hand, sees the possibility to co-produce space-launch rockets similar to Ukraine’s Zenit-2 and transfer know-how on engine technology, a key bottleneck for the Turkish defence industry.
Source:The Edge
