TURKEY AND RUSSIA EXERCISE GEOSTRATEGIC ARMISTICE BUT NOT MULTILATERAL COOPERATION

PanARMENIAN.Net
14.02.2007 13:30 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ During the recent years the Russia-Turkey strategic
relations that used to determine Turkey’s foreign policy for decades
were subjected to severe erosion and lost their real meaning, Dr
Ruben Safrastyan, the Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies
at the RA Academy of Sciences, told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter. In
his words, this can be proved by serious discord between the United
States and Turkey. "Furthermore, with Erdogan’s islamistic Justice
and Development party coming to power, Turkey’s foreign policy
is remarkable for the aspiration to normalize relations with the
neighbor Islam states. However, it’s not to Washington’s liking,"
Safrastyan said.

According to him, the process of political reconciliation between
Turkey and Russia is not smooth, as the principal geopolitical
disagreements have not been settled yet. "The official Russian-Turkish
documents contain the term "multilateral cooperation" instead of
"cooperation" in order to underscore a higher level of relations
between the two states. I prefer the term ‘geostrategic armistice’
that implies the factor of rapprochement of Turkey and Russia with
geopolitical discrepancies maintained. Anyway, we can conclude that
Turkey’s foreign policy tends to independence," Safrastyan said.