Turkey And Russia News: Exports From Ankara To Moscow Rose 57 Percent As Countries Form Alliance In Syria

Turkey’s monthly exports saw the greatest increase in more than four years in January, according to a Turkish trade group, which attributed a large share of the rise to an increasingly close ally for the country—Russia. Exports rose 15 percent in the first month of 2017 to more than $10.5 billion, while exports to Russia rose by 57 percent, the Turkish Exporters Assembly said in a Wednesday press release. The 12-month period ending in January, by contrast, saw growth of 1.8 percent.

“We expect an increase in petroleum and commodity prices, [a] decrease in export losses in Russia due to normalization of relations and [an] increase in petroleum exporting countries’ imports,” the group’s president, Mehmet Buyukeksi, said in the release.

The news followed months of warming diplomatic relations between Turkey and its now much larger trading partner. Early on in Syria’s civil war, Turkey served as “a Grand Central Station for jihadists,” as Atlantic correspondent Graeme Wood told MSNBC in January. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, backed Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime and began using airstrikes in its effort to eradicate extremist groups like the Islamic State groupin 2015.

Incidences of violence between the two countries have been abundant over the past couple of years, with Turkish jets shooting down a Russian attack aircraft in November 2015 and a Turkish deputy police officer assassinating Russia’s ambassador to Turkey as recently as December.

But in October, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has seen his country flooded with refugees, began to insist on Turkey’s “historical responsibility” to protect Sunni Arabs from Shia militias, many of which were allied with the U.S. against the Islamic State group.

And as New York University journalism professor and former Newsday Middle East Bureau Chief Mohamad Bazzi wrote in a Jan. 20 Reuters op-ed, the improved relationship between the two countries—as the trade group put it, a “normalization”—may have consequences that go beyond monthly export values.

“In flirting with Russia, Erdogan’s government is sending a message to the incoming Donald Trump administration that Ankara has other options if the United States continues its support of Syrian Kurdish factions,” Bazzi wrote. “But as it gets closer to Russia and more deeply involved in fighting [the] Islamic State, Turkey risks incurring the group’s wrath.”