In Astana, the interior ministers of the Organization of Turkic States have begun discussing common airport corridors and their own Turkpol. Behind the dry protocol lies a much sharper question: are five countries ready to open their police databases to one another?
On September 10, 2026, Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci stepped before reporters in Astana after a meeting whose official summary could easily have fit on a postcard. It was the third meeting of the interior ministers of the Organization of Turkic States, chaired by the host, Yerzhan Sadenov. Azerbaijan was represented by Interior Minister Vilayat Eyvazov, and before the session the delegations were received by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. Routine protocol. The Turkish minister began with antiquity, recalling the monument to Kul Tigin erected on the steppe roughly thirteen centuries ago and the inscription describing a ruler who did not sleep at night or sit idle during the day. He then moved on to matters far more practical and considerably more interesting.
According to Ciftci, the five countries are continuing work on common or specially designated passport-control checkpoints for citizens of Turkic states at airports, studying European experience and discussing expanded travel using national identity cards. As a model, the minister cited arrangements already operating between Turkey and Azerbaijan and between Turkey and Northern Cyprus. The second announcement was more striking than the first. Ciftci put it this way: “Just as there are Interpol and Europol, I proposed the creation of a similar organization, Turkpol.” The minister added that his counterparts from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan responded positively to the idea.
A word about the source. All these details come from one minister's press remarks, not from a joint document signed by the five countries. An interested party always says more than partners are prepared to put their names to, so I read the Turkish version as a proposal rather than a decision. Still, it is a substantive proposal: the future structure already has a name, and the founding agreement already has a date for its first technical meeting. Details like these are rarely invented on the fly in diplomacy.
There is no Turkic Schengen yet. But for the first time, blueprints for its foundation are on the table.
180 Million: The Number That Conceals Hungary
I will start with the arithmetic, because confusion has already grown around it.
According to the latest economic review prepared jointly by the OTS and Azerbaijan's Center for Analysis of Economic Reforms and Communication, the combined population of the countries included in its definition of the Turkic space is 178.8 million. This figure is often rounded up to “nearly 180 million Turkic people.” A correction is necessary. The Organization has five full members: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Uzbekistan. The observers are Hungary, Turkmenistan and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, as well as the Economic Cooperation Organization. If national statistical data for the five member states alone are added together, the total is roughly 160 million people, more than half of whom live in Turkey. The rest comes from the observers, above all Hungary, with its nearly ten million EU citizens.
The distinction is fundamental. Any free-movement regime would be designed for 160 million people, not 180 million, and one country formally included in the “Turkic space” simply cannot join it. Hungary belongs to the Schengen Area and is required to apply the common European visa policy. Budapest can share its experience, but a common OTS corridor for citizens at a Hungarian airport would be legally impossible.
The economic picture is similar: the figures are impressive until one looks at their composition. In the first quarter of 2026, the combined GDP of the countries included in the review was estimated at $673.6 billion, or about 2.34 percent of global GDP. For January through September 2025, the nominal GDP of the states covered by another study stood at about $1.79 trillion, with foreign trade turnover of approximately $958.5 billion. Average growth was around 6 percent, compared with roughly 3 percent for the world economy. The two estimates cover different groups of countries and different periods, so they cannot be compared directly. They agree on the central point: this is an economic space comparable in scale to a major European economy and growing twice as fast as the global average.
Another figure is even more revealing. In 2024, trade directly among OTS member states reached $38.3 billion, up about 24 percent in a year. According to the Organization's leadership, mutual trade accounts for only about 7 percent of the OTS countries' total foreign trade. Several years ago, the figure was around 3 percent. It has doubled, but from a very small base. For comparison, intra-EU trade accounts for roughly 60 percent of the member states' total merchandise trade.
That is the economic logic behind the entire passport issue. A border costs time, and time costs money. An extra hour in line or an unclear registration rule makes every business trip and every student exchange more expensive. The five countries began addressing this problem for freight earlier. In 2022, they adopted a Trade Facilitation Strategy, established a dedicated committee and launched a simplified customs corridor project. In January 2025, Baku approved a plan for implementing the electronic e-TIR system and technical specifications for data exchange under the simplified customs corridor agreement. Freight is already acquiring its integration infrastructure. Now it is the turn of people.
Schengen Is Not an Airport Counter
It is important here not to fall for the attractive oversimplification that appears in so many headlines.
A genuine Schengen Area means the absence of routine border controls at internal borders between participating states. Faster screening has nothing to do with that. Today the zone consists of 29 countries: 25 EU members plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Bulgaria and Romania first removed checks at air and sea borders on March 31, 2024, and became full participants on January 1, 2025. Within this area, more than 450 million people travel without routine passport checks.
Freedom on the inside is paid for by an extraordinarily expensive security system on the outside. All 29 states apply common rules for short-term visas, including the well-known limit of 90 days in any 180-day period. The Schengen Information System, SIS, is Europe's largest information-sharing mechanism for border guards, police, customs authorities, migration services and courts. It stores data on wanted and missing persons, stolen documents and vehicles. Since April 10, 2026, the electronic Entry/Exit System, EES, has been fully operational, recording third-country nationals crossing external borders along with facial images and fingerprints. By July 2026, it had registered more than 145 million border crossings. Alongside it operate the Visa Information System, VIS, and the Eurodac fingerprint database, with all these datasets gradually being integrated into a single digital ecosystem. Brussels plans to add the electronic travel authorization system ETIAS as the next layer.
Schengen begins at the moment when State A is prepared to trust the way State B screened a person at its external border. The sign above an airport lane is secondary.
It is telling that Europeans took a very long time to reach that point. The original agreement was signed by five countries in the Luxembourg town of Schengen in 1985. The convention implementing it followed in 1990, but border controls between the first participating states did not actually disappear until 1995. Ten years from signature to empty booths.
There was also an earlier precedent that receives less attention. The Nordic countries abolished passport requirements for travel among themselves as early as 1952, and in 1957 and 1958 they eliminated passport controls at the internal borders of the Nordic Passport Union. Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden managed without supranational databases because their societies were relatively small and the level of trust among their police services was exceptionally high. The Turkic world is in the opposite position. The legal systems of the five states differ substantially, while Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Syria are nearby. The Scandinavian path is closed to the five. What remains is the European path, meaning a long and expensive one.
Baku and Ankara Have Long Traveled Without Passports. Why Have the Others Not?
The OTS has one advantage: it does not have to start from scratch.
Since April 1, 2021, citizens of Azerbaijan and Turkey traveling directly between the two countries have been able to use new-generation identity cards instead of international passports. The protocol was signed on December 10, 2020, one month after the end of the Second Karabakh War, and the timing was hardly accidental. The Shusha Declaration on allied relations, signed in June 2021, gave political form to what border services in the two countries were already implementing technically.
Azerbaijan has visa-free arrangements with all four of its OTS partners, and citizens of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey may stay in Azerbaijan for up to 90 days. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan also have a visa-free regime allowing stays of up to 90 days in every 180-day period, and national identity cards are among the documents accepted for travel.
Visas, therefore, ceased to be the main problem long ago. The real problem lies one level below: document formats differ, as do registration procedures, rules for recording foreigners, data-retention periods and information-exchange protocols. All five countries have introduced or are introducing chip-based identity cards, but no one has publicly confirmed the interoperability of their electronic standards.
South America offers a useful example. Citizens of Mercosur countries have long crossed one another's borders using national identity cards, while the 2002 Residence Agreement simplified relocation for work and study. Passport control, however, has not been abolished. The model of “the check remains, but the passport is unnecessary” appears to be the most natural intermediate stage for the OTS.
In practice, the system might work like this. An Azerbaijani citizen lands in Istanbul, Astana, Bishkek or Tashkent and, instead of joining the general line for foreigners, uses a separate lane marked OTS Citizens. Screening and national migration policy remain fully intact. What changes is speed. The next level would be automated electronic gates: a scanner reads an identity card or biometric passport, a camera compares the traveler's face with the biometric template stored on the chip, the system verifies the document's validity and simultaneously checks national and agreed interstate databases. If there is no entry ban, the passenger is through in a matter of seconds.
Buying a scanner is easy. The difficulty is the data.
For an Azerbaijani border guard to accept a Kazakh identity card as a full-fledged travel document, the system must instantly establish four things: the document is genuine, it remains valid, it has not been reported stolen, and the person presenting it is its rightful holder. Turkey needs precisely the same guarantees for Uzbek documents, and Uzbekistan for Kyrgyz documents. That means interoperable biometric standards and secure channels through which lists of lost and stolen documents can be updated in real time. Technically, all of this has long been possible. Politically, it has not.
Turkpol: The Police Move Ahead of the Border Guards
The most interesting idea to emerge in Astana concerned the police, not airports.
The concept of Turkpol grew out of a less eye-catching project: the OTS Council for Combating Crime. The first technical meeting on the text of its founding agreement was held online on July 14, 2026. In November 2025, the Police Academies Platform of the Turkic States was established to develop common training standards. At the Astana meeting, Ciftci proposed the next stage: creating, under an international treaty, a full-fledged law-enforcement cooperation agency modeled on Europol. He described the agenda in detail: transnational crime, new-generation criminal organizations, terrorism, drug networks, illegal migration, unlawful betting and gambling. Earlier ministerial meetings had also addressed human trafficking, migrant smuggling and cybercrime.
The Turkish minister supported his proposal with statistics from his own country. According to his figures, in 2026 Turkish police carried out 1,568 operations against 557 organized criminal groups, 18 of them international, blocked 58,247 illegal betting websites and brought 657 internationally wanted individuals back to the country. These are agency figures and cannot be independently verified, but their message is clear: Ankara is signaling to its partners that it has resources and is prepared to share them, while also expecting reciprocal assistance in locating and extraditing people it is seeking.
The combination of “freedom of movement plus police integration” comes directly from European logic. If a German border guard no longer checks everyone arriving from France, police in both countries need another way to know who has crossed the border. SIS performs that compensating function. A fast-track lane can be opened without a shared database. Travel on identity cards can also be permitted without one. Eliminating controls entirely is impossible without such a database.
That leads to questions the five countries will have to resolve long before the lines disappear. A person is barred from entering one OTS country but not another: which restriction applies in the common corridor? Who has the authority to enter records into the shared system, who corrects them when errors occur, how long are they retained, and which agencies receive access? Europe spent thirty years answering such questions and created a separate body of personal-data protection law in the process. Within Interpol, the same function is performed by a special commission overseeing its files, to which anyone who believes a record concerning them is politically motivated may appeal. The OTS has nothing comparable yet, and Turkpol will be workable only to the extent that its partners trust that the common database will not become an instrument of any one country's domestic politics.
This is the most delicate point in the entire project. An airport scanner can be installed in six months. Trust in another country's wanted-person list takes years to build.
Who Will Get Nervous in Moscow, Brussels and Beijing
Any integration project in Eurasia immediately attracts the attention of neighboring powers, and Turkic integration is no exception.
Moscow views the project primarily through the prism of the Eurasian Economic Union. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are members of the EAEU; Azerbaijan, Turkey and Uzbekistan are not. Even within the EAEU, passport controls between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have not disappeared: citizens still enter through official border crossings, and permitted lengths of stay remain governed by migration rules. A common OTS border standard would create a second layer of obligations for Astana and Bishkek, overlapping with the first. After the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall on March 22, 2024, Russia sharply tightened its migration regime, and Central Asian labor migrants began looking more closely at alternative markets, including Turkey. Making travel between Tashkent, Bishkek and Istanbul easier objectively strengthens that shift. The Kremlin understands this, and Kazakhstan's diplomacy, known for cautious multivector balancing, will calibrate every step.
Brussels has a different interest. In December 2013, Turkey and the EU launched a visa-liberalization dialogue while simultaneously signing a readmission agreement. The roadmap contained 72 benchmarks, including gradual alignment of Turkish visa policy with European policy. The process stalled more than a decade ago, and negotiations on Turkey's EU membership are effectively frozen. Against that backdrop, Ankara is building an alternative mobility space to the east, one in which it does not have to satisfy conditions set by others. In my view, this is the hidden motive behind the Turkish initiative: to demonstrate that Turkey has its own sphere of attraction, where it sets standards rather than adopts them.
Beijing approaches anything involving Turkic peoples through the prism of Xinjiang. Uyghur diasporas exist in both Turkey and Kazakhstan, and a common OTS police database would inevitably raise the question of how partner states would handle requests concerning these communities. Central Asian capitals, dependent on Chinese investment and transit, will try not to sharpen the issue. Any solution is unlikely to be made public.
The Cyprus Mine Beneath the Common Corridor
Ciftci cited Northern Cyprus as a model, and here the project runs into a problem Ankara prefers not to acknowledge.
The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus received OTS observer status at the Samarkand summit in November 2022. Turkey is the only country that recognizes it. The other four member states of the Organization do not, and in April 2025, at the first EU-Central Asia summit in Samarkand, Central Asian leaders signed a declaration referring to United Nations Security Council Resolutions 541 and 550, which condemn the proclamation of the northern Cypriot state. Ankara reacted irritably.
Identity-card travel between Turkey and Northern Cyprus works because Turkey considers Northern Cyprus a state. For Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan to accept a Northern Cypriot document at its border would amount to a step toward recognition, something they will not do as long as they value relations with the European Union. The conclusion follows: any future OTS travel regime, if it emerges, will apply to citizens of the five member states, while observers will remain outside it. Hungary will be kept out by Schengen, Northern Cyprus by non-recognition. Turkmenistan itself will be unwilling to give up one of the most restrictive visa systems on the planet. Harsh, but honest.
Why Baku Is Starting With the Airport, Not the Border Gate
For Azerbaijan, the Astana agenda carries particular weight, and for highly pragmatic reasons.
Baku lies between the two largest parts of the Turkic world. Turkey is separated from Central Asia by the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea, while Azerbaijan's land border with Turkey exists only along a short stretch in Nakhchivan. The route through Zangezur, agreed in Washington on August 8, 2025, is intended finally to connect Azerbaijan's main territory with Nakhchivan and therefore with Turkey. The Middle Corridor follows the same axis: China, Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Europe. When railways, ports, customs procedures and freight documents are being integrated, passengers cannot remain the last element of the old system.
The Azerbaijani model has a feature that is best stated openly. Since 2020, the country's land borders have been closed to passenger traffic, and the restriction has been extended repeatedly. The first exception was an agreement to resume the daily Baku-Tbilisi passenger train on May 26, 2026, for the first time in almost six years. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev explained official Baku's logic on February 14, 2024, during his inauguration ceremony: the border must be secured so tightly “that not even a bird can fly through,” while ideological risks, he said, “know no borders.”
Critics see a contradiction between this policy and talk of a Turkic Schengen. I see consistency. Azerbaijan, having experienced thirty years of occupation and the 2020 war, is building openness according to the principle of filtration: control first, speed second. An airport is the ideal environment for such a model. Every passenger undergoes biometric screening, and a decision is made before that person enters the country. An OTS Citizens corridor at Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku would not contradict the policy of strict border protection; it would extend it. The state opens exactly the door it fully controls.
Azerbaijan also has practical advantages. It was the first OTS country to establish identity-card travel. It has visa-free arrangements with all its partners. Baku Airport serves as a hub between Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia, with direct flights to Central Asian capitals and major Turkish cities. The second meeting of OTS interior ministers took place in Baku, and Ciftci explicitly described it in Astana as the starting point for the current phase. If a pilot common-corridor project is launched anywhere first, my assessment is that it will be on the Baku-Istanbul route, where the legal basis already exists.
Five Steps Toward an Invisible Border
My generation remembers the reverse process. In the early 1990s, borders that had never existed before suddenly rose between Baku, Almaty and Tashkent within a matter of months, and for the first few years few people understood exactly where or with which documents they were supposed to cross them. Dismantling barriers always takes longer than erecting them.
A realistic sequence for the OTS would look like this. First, designated corridors at major airports operating under a common standard. Then mutual recognition of national electronic identity cards in all five countries, extending the Azerbaijani-Turkish model to the remaining ten bilateral combinations. After that would come harmonization of short-term stay rules and advance passenger-information procedures. The fourth step would be a common database of lost documents, entry bans and wanted persons, operating under Turkpol's supervision and governed by clear data-protection rules.
Only after that could the question of partially eliminating systematic checks between individual states theoretically arise. Even then, the model would probably not replicate Europe's. Controls could remain at land borders while being almost completely automated at airports. An OTS citizen might pass through a special regional control channel rather than regular international screening. For a space that does not have a single contiguous territory, such flexibility looks more like an advantage than a weakness.
The tourism argument also strengthens the case. In 2024, the countries of the Turkic space received nearly 100 million international visitors. Tourism within the OTS is restrained not so much by ticket prices as by the perception that a trip becomes an administrative procedure. A traveler is more likely to buy a spontaneous Samarkand-Baku or Bishkek-Istanbul ticket if confident there will be no surprises at the border. Psychological geography changes through details like these, and in Europe that effect of Schengen proved almost as significant as the economic one.
The institutional framework is already emerging. The OTS was created in 2009 by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey as the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States. Uzbekistan joined in 2019, and the Organization adopted its present name in 2021. Today, its framework includes cooperation mechanisms among interior and justice ministers, customs authorities, central banks, investment agencies, judicial councils and prosecutors general. The capital of the Turkic Investment Fund has been increased to $600 million. According to the Organization's leadership, the Union of Chambers of Commerce and Industry brings together more than two million companies.
For the sake of accuracy, it is equally important to list what does not exist. There is no common visa code and no common external border. There is also no equivalent of SIS and no supranational border agency comparable to Europe's Frontex. There is no common migration policy and no unified regime governing deportation, readmission or asylum. Nor is there a single personal-data protection framework applying across the entire area. It is therefore inaccurate to claim that the five countries are “already creating a Schengen.” It is equally mistaken to dismiss what is happening simply because the final model is not yet complete.
My Forecast: What Will Happen Before 2030
An analyst's position is worth little without testable forecasts, so I will put mine on the record.
At the OTS summit in Ankara in October 2026, which Ciftci explicitly identified as the target of the preparations in Astana, the leaders will approve the concept of a Council for Combating Crime and mention Turkpol in the final declaration. A founding agreement establishing a full-fledged agency will be signed no earlier than 2027 and ratified by all five participating countries no earlier than 2028.
The first designated corridors for OTS citizens will appear by the end of 2027 in at least two airports, one of them in Baku. Identity-card travel will extend beyond the Azerbaijani-Turkish pair to at least one additional pair of states by the end of 2028. The most likely candidates are Turkey and Uzbekistan, or Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.
There will be no abolition of systematic passport controls between any two OTS members before 2035. Here I am prepared to be wrong in only one direction: if political will in Baku and Ankara proves stronger than bureaucratic inertia, the Azerbaijani-Turkish pair could move faster than the others and become the core of a “two-speed Schengen.” The Central Asian trio, constrained by commitments involving the EAEU and China, will move more slowly.
One question remains unanswered, and I will not pretend to know the answer. Will Ankara agree to have its own entries in a common database reviewed by its partners under the same rules by which it will want to review theirs?
Corridor Number Three
Today, the arrivals hall at Baku Airport has two lines: one for Azerbaijani citizens and one for everyone else. A border officer in a glass booth takes the passport, looks at the traveler's face, scans the page and stamps it. An engineer arriving from Tashkent and a tourist arriving from Lisbon stand in the same line and wait in exactly the same way.
If Ankara signs in October what was prepared in Astana in September, a third sign could appear above the entrance to the hall within a year or two. It will bear three Latin letters, and beneath it will stand an electronic gate that takes four seconds to compare the Uzbek engineer's face with the chip in his identity card and with a database whose existence the passenger does not even know about.
The monument to Kul Tigin, recalled by the Turkish minister in Astana, has stood on the steppe for thirteen centuries. The turnstile will not need that long. It needs only five interior ministries to agree on who may place other people's names on a common list and under what conditions.