Why is Turkey showing its willingness to lead the NATO operation in Ukraine?

Ankara expressed its readiness to send its forces to protect Ukraine from the Russian invasion.

However, this doesn’t mean that Turkey will fight Russia.

Erdogan’s cunning plan seeks to amass the most important gains by showing readiness in and of itself.

And winning is in four critical areas at once: between allies, voters, Russians, and Ukrainians.

First, Turkey wants to show its loyalty to the United States.

Second, Recep Erdogan shows loyalty to the idea of ​​a “Turkish world” that is popular with his constituents.

The Turks of all Turkey see the Crimean Peninsula and the Crimean Tatars as part of their Turkish world, and therefore they received with great resentment the transfer of the peninsula to Russian sovereignty.

And third, Erdogan reviews the potential of his foreign policy against Russia.

Although the Turkish elites reacted negatively to the return of Crimea to Russia, they received Russia’s coming to Syria more negatively.

So, Erdogan decided to respond in an analogous way, by entering the territories that Moscow considers its exclusive sphere of influence.

Fourthly and finally, Ukraine is important to Turkey in its own right.

As a market, as a power in the Black Sea, and of course as a source of technology for Turkey’s burgeoning military-industrial complex.

Erdogan’s problem is that his cunning plan will succeed only if the war in Donbass doesn’t start.

But if the Ukrainian authorities, who do not fully obey the West, decide to organize a blitzkrieg against the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, Turkey will refrain from sending its forces to Ukraine, and will promptly withdraw all military advisers and specialists from there as will the United Kingdom.

However, in Ankara, it seems, they think the game is worth playing, because the stakes of war are low.

They may be right, but they may have overestimated the degree of Western control over Kiev’s elites.

For them, a localized war in the Donbass may, at some point, be the only possible way to disrupt Russian-Western agreements.