https://ahvalnews.com-Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan convened a meeting of his cabinet on Monday and declared that Turkey will use its authority over the entrance to the Black Sea to restrict access to the Black Sea. However, what the implications of this are remain unclear.
“Turkey is determined to use the authority given by the Montreux Convention on Turkish Straits in a manner to prevent escalation of the Russia-Ukraine crisis,” Erdoğan said in a press conference after the meeting.
Under the 1936 Montreux Convention, Turkey is in charge of regulating the passage of ships into and out of the Black Sea and has the power to close them to warships. However, it has been loath to do so lest it sacrifice its perceived neutrality between Russia and Ukraine.
According to the convention, Black Sea nations must notify Turkey eight days in advance of their warships, including submarines, transiting the straits while warships belonging to other nations require 15 days notice. The decision to block ships could affect an estimated 16 Russian warships and submarines currently in the Mediterranean, some of which are part of their Black Sea fleet.
Erdoğan repeated his disappointment with Russia’s decision to go to war with Ukraine last Thursday and repeated his offer to mediate the conflict between the two countries, which he called friends of Turkey. In anticipation of any disruption to Turkey’s energy supplies from the conflict, the Turkish leader announced that taxes on energy would be cut and a discount will be provided for electricity providers.
On Saturday, a phone call took place between Ukraine’s embattled President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in which Zelenskiy thanked Erdoğan for his support in the ongoing war with Russia. After the call, Zelenskiy tweeted his thanks to Turkey for a “ban on the passage of Russian warships” to the Black Sea, but Turkish officials refuted that they had made such a decision at the time.
A day later, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that a state of war existed between Russia and Ukraine, according to an analysis provided by Turkish legal experts. This distinction would allow Turkey to move forward with closing the Straits if it chose to do so.
Yet Erdoğan refrained from explicitly saying whether Turkey would restrict access to Russia’s warships. Since the initial warnings that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine in late 2021, Turkey has tried to position itself as neutral between Ukraine and Russia while offering mediation.
Erdoğan still appeared to be trying to keep this position intact at the press conference. He insisted that Turkey was ready to fulfill its commitments as a member of NATO and a supporter of international efforts to end the war, but made clear that Turkey could not sacrifice its own interests by taking a side.
“Turkey will not give up its national interests but won’t neglect the regional and global balance either,” the president went on to say. “We won’t turn away from Russia or Ukraine,” said Erdoğan.
Diplomatic efforts by the United States and European Union with Russia were unable to prevent Russia from launching what President Vladimir Putin called a “special military operation” into Ukraine on February 24. Prior to the invasion, Moscow demanded that the West refuse Ukraine membership in NATO, halt any expansion of the alliance and retreat to its pre-1997 boundaries in Central and Eastern Europe. The West flatly refused.
Erdoğan was skeptical of what he considered Russia’s excessive demands, but he was also critical of what he saw as the “indecisiveness” of Western efforts to forestall war in Ukraine. Turkey has never joined in on sanctions against Russia despite condemning the 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and Erdoğan built up a personal rapport with Putin in subsequent years.
However, Russia has rejected Erdoğan’s offers to negotiate, focusing instead on securing concessions from the United States and President Joe Biden. Moscow has also been sharply critical of Ankara’s military exports to Ukraine, including shipments of its TB-2 Bayraktar drones that have been assailing Russian convoys and troop formations in the last week.
This has not prevented Turkey from continuing to pursue talks with Russia. Over the weekend, Çavuşoğlu and Turkey’s Minister of Defence Hulusi Akar spoke to their counterparts in Russia to encourage de-escalation. At the same time, President Ilham Aliyev of Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan encouraged Putin during a visit to Moscow to consider Turkish-Azeri mediation of the conflict.
These efforts are also in parallel to coordination between Turkey, Ukraine and the West. Despite Erdoğan’s recriminations against Western diplomacy and reliance on sanctions, Turkish diplomats have been in touch with their Western counterparts from the start and throughout the crisis.
İbrahim Kalın, President Erdoğan ‘s chief foreign policy advisor, spoke over the phone with Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan about the war and reiterated Turkish support for Ukraine. According to Erdoğan’s office, Kalin and Sullivan agreed to “intensify efforts towards a ceasefire”.
Separately, representatives from Ukraine and Russia met on the Ukrainian side of the border with Belarus to discuss terms of a ceasefire. The talks did not produce an initial outcome, but agreed to continue talks.