Turkey Provides Happy Hunting Ground for Russia

Turkey may object to the Kremlin’s behavior in Syria, and other places like Libya, but there remain several areas where two countries seem to be in near-perfect lockstep — the most important being Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The Russian House, a branch of Rossotrudnichestvo, a main tool of the Russian soft power effort abroad, operates with complete freedom in Turkey. And it uses that liberty to openly promote the war in Ukraine.

On January 6, the Russian House in Ankara proudly reported it had successfully collected goods for the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. “The Russian House in Ankara, together with the KSORS [the Coordination Council of the Organization of Russian Compatriots] of Turkey, organized a collection of gifts for our fighters for the first time: compatriots from Adana, Alanya, Ankara, Antalya, Manisa and Istanbul collected Turkish sweets, dried fruits and nuts, tea, coffee, and warm clothes. Children donated soft toys and letters with wishes to return home soon. The personnel of the Russian House also joined in collecting.”

The same day the help was delivered to the frontline, the Russian House posted a video on its Facebook page from the soldiers of the 656^th Motorized Rifle Regiment, sending thanks for the dried fruits.

The 656^th gained fame in late December when pro-war Russian channels shared a video of its soldiers assaulting a Ukrainian position on bikes while destroying a fortified checkpoint near Vuhledar in the Donetsk region.

A few months before, the head of the Russian House, Alexander Sotnichenko, scored another propaganda success by organizing an exhibition in Ankara entitled, “War crimes of the Kyiv regime.”

Sotnichenko is expanding his operations: last December, Rossotrudnichestvo announced plans to launch a network of Russian House partner organizations in Turkey, but also in Thailand, Oman and Côte d’Ivoire.

This will make anyone resident in Turkey and opposed to the Kremlin’s war of aggression feel uncomfortable, but there are multiple additional reasons to feel that way. The country has always been a disturbing place for anti-regime individuals; since the all-out war began, it has become deeply dangerous.  

Turkey has a long history of tolerating Russian intelligence operations on its soil. These include assassinations, which began in the late 2000s. Thanks to two Chechen wars in the 1990s and early 2000s, many Chechen refugees, including militants, had found asylum in the country, mostly in Istanbul.

In September 2008, Gaji Edilsultanov, a former Chechen field commander, was murdered in that city. Three months later, former Chechen warlord Islam Janibekov was assassinated in front of his wife and children there — he was hit by three bullets to the head and died on the spot. Musa Atayev, another Chechen rebel, was killed in Istanbul on February 26, 2009.

The assassinations continued in the next decade: in April 2016 two Russian hitmen, Yuri Anisimov and Alexander Smirnov, were detained in Turkey on suspicion of killing an administrator of the website Kavkaz-Center, a website of Chechen Islamist insurgents, a few months before. Next year, they were quietly handed over to the Russian authorities.

In 2021 the Turks arrested six men, four of them Russian, accused of plans to attack Chechen opposition activists residing in this country. By 2024, Russian human rights groups suspected that at least some of the arrested had already been handed over to Russia.

The killings apparently did no damage to Russian-Turkish security service cooperation. And the war in Ukraine has only strengthened it.

Six months after the full-scale invasion began, Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov went to Ankara to sign an agreement with his Turkish counterpart. The text of the document was kept secret, but Krasnov remarked: “It is Turkey that has become the key to Russia’s extradition procedures and the transit of criminals extradited to Russia by third countries.”

Two years later, in July 2024, when Krasnov had another meeting with Turkey’s prosecutor Muhsin Senturk, this time in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, he was jubilant about the level of cooperation and offered effusive praise: “It is in large part owing to personal contacts at a high level that Turkey has begun actively extraditing persons wanted under warrants from Russian law enforcement agencies. I fully share this practice-oriented and non-politicized approach,” he said.

The same month the FSB claimed an enormous success in Turkey. Only two days had elapsed since the car bombing of a Russian officer in Moscow, when a primary suspect, Yevgeny Serebryakov, was identified and caught. Serebryakov was arrested in the Turkish coastal resort of Bodrum and swiftly deported to Moscow.

Back in Moscow, Serebryakov admitted he had acted on the orders of the Ukrainian Security Service SBU.

Russia has every reason to be happy with these developments, just as with Russia’s continuing use of gas pipelines running through the country to Europe, which aids its lucrative sanctions-evasion efforts.

The Atlantic alliance has every reason to be concerned. A NATO member is working hand-in-glove with the secret services of a country which believes the alliance to be its sworn enemy. And in the present geopolitical circumstances, it doesn’t look like anyone can do anything about it.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan  are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. 

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.