Astana proposed letting Moscow into the Organization of Turkic States, knowing full well that Baku and Ankara would not open the door. That, it seems, was the whole point.
On October 30, 1992, Turgut Özal convened the first summit of the heads of the Turkic-speaking states in Ankara. Around the table sat leaders of countries that had ceased to be Soviet only ten months earlier, and the photograph of that meeting read like a manifesto: from now on, Moscow would not decide whom they could be friends with. Exactly thirty-four years later, on October 30, 2026, in the same city, in the exhibition hall of the Beştepe presidential complex, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed bringing Moscow back to that table.
"If Russia became part of the Turkic countries, that is, of our organization, it would benefit all of our states," he said at the 13th summit of the Organization of Turkic States. Tokayev named two options: bringing Russia into the "OTS Plus" format or granting it observer status. He called a positive response to Moscow's intention the right and fair decision.
The Kremlin responded three days later. On November 2, Vladimir Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, called Russia's participation in the organization's work appropriate and natural, noting the Turkic origins of the peoples of a number of Russian regions. A caveat followed immediately: Moscow had received no official invitation. Judging by the reactions in Baku and Ankara, it will not receive one in the future either.
The paradox is glaring. Kazakhstan is one of the four states that signed the Nakhchivan Agreement on October 3, 2009, establishing the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States. The organization, which took its current name at the 2021 Istanbul summit, was conceived in large part as a space where its members could talk to one another without a Moscow interpreter. Now one of its founding fathers is proposing to invite that interpreter in. The move cannot be called naive. Tokayev is a career diplomat of the Soviet school who served in 2011–2013 as UN under-secretary-general and director-general of the UN Office at Geneva, and he does not make offhand remarks at summits. The remark, then, was calculated. The only question is who it was aimed at.
An Invitation Nobody Asked For
Formally, Tokayev proposed nothing exotic. The "OTS Plus" mechanism, which provides for cooperation with states and bodies outside the organization, has been under discussion for several years, and on May 15, 2026, at the informal summit in Turkistan, the Kazakh president himself called for clear criteria for those wishing to join it. In Ankara, Shavkat Mirziyoyev also spoke about developing "OTS Plus." The difference lies in the addressee. The Uzbek leader spoke about third countries in general. The Kazakh leader named a specific one, a country that has been at war with a neighboring state since February 2022 and whose politicians have for years mused that the borders of the Central Asian republics were drawn arbitrarily.
The rationale was pointedly cultural. Russia has been tied to the Turkic world for centuries, many Turkic peoples have historically lived on its territory, Moscow is promoting the "Altai: Cradle of Turkic Civilization" project, which Astana supports, and the Russian language contains many words of Turkic origin. The last argument is especially telling. By the same logic, the organization would have to invite a good half of the Balkans, where Turkish borrowings are every bit as common.
Something else is more intriguing. Tokayev referred to Russia's intention, although Moscow had declared no such intention publicly: before October 30, open sources contained neither an official membership request nor an application for observer status. That leaves two explanations. Either the Kazakh president voiced something agreed upon behind closed doors, for instance on July 25 in Omsk, where he met with Putin at the 22nd Forum of Interregional Cooperation, or he formulated Russia's wish on Russia's behalf. Who asked whom first we will most likely never know.
A Language-Based Entry Pass: How Ankara Closed the Door Without Slamming It
The Turkish response came from the ruling party's headquarters rather than the Foreign Ministry, and the choice of venue was itself a signal. On November 3, Kürşad Zorlu, deputy chairman of the Justice and Development Party in charge of relations with the Turkic states, reminded everyone of the rules. Observer status is available to a state where a Turkic or related language is the state or official language throughout the entire country. Tatar, Bashkir, Yakut and Russia's other Turkic languages are official only within the borders of their own republics, and that is not enough for the OTS. Everyone else is offered the "OTS Plus" format, in which meetings with outside partners at the level of heads of state or foreign ministers take place only by the joint decision of all members. A Russian application, should one arrive, would be assessed in light of the common interests of the Turkic world.
Let me translate from the diplomatic. Russia cannot become an observer on formal grounds, and it can enter "OTS Plus" only by consensus, which means each of the five members holds a veto. The refusal comes wrapped in procedure. No one in Ankara ever actually said the word "no."
Zorlu also offered Moscow a consolation prize. Turkey is ready to resume cooperation with six Russian republics, Altai, Tuva, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Yakutia and Khakassia, through the International Organization of Turkic Culture, TURKSOY. It was founded in 1993 by Turkey and the Turkic-speaking states of the former Soviet Union, and the six republics received observer status in it. Contacts were severed at the end of 2015. After a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Russian Su-24 near the Syrian border on November 24, Moscow ordered the republics to cut off all communication with TURKSOY.
It is an elegant move. Ankara is effectively telling the Kremlin: we will be friends with your Turks directly, through culture and shared heritage, while the state-level floor of the Turkic house stays locked. For Moscow, which has spent decades building a rigid chain of command in the ethnic republics and in 2018 used a federal law to make the study of their languages in schools optional, such an offer sounds almost like a challenge. The Kremlin will almost certainly refuse. Ankara will then be able to say, with a clear conscience, that the door was left open.
An even sharper assessment came from a former secretary general of the Turkic Council, the Turkish diplomat who led the organization in its early years. Turkic communities, he noted, live everywhere from Bulgaria and Greece to Iran and Iraq, and their presence alone does not entitle a country to a seat in the organization. His closing formula, "let us be neighbors with Russia, let us be friends," captures the mood of the Turkish establishment precisely. Neighbors, yes. Housemates, no.
Ankara has its own reasons for not quarreling with Moscow. Rosatom is building the Akkuyu nuclear power plant in Mersin province, and Russian gas flows into the country through TurkStream. Year after year, Russian tourists remain one of the largest groups of visitors to the Turkish coast. At a gala dinner with the summit participants, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said there is no room for division within the family circle of the Turkic world. What sets a family circle apart from a revolving door is that guests are invited only with the consent of everyone in the household.
Why Baku Said No Before Anyone Else
In Azerbaijan, Tokayev's proposal met a harsher reception than anywhere else. I started out in journalism at a time when Turkic unity was the stuff of poets, not defense ministers, and I remember well how much effort it took to turn that rhetoric into institutions. Leading Azerbaijani media outlets and analysts stated their objections without diplomatic niceties, and two layers are easy to discern in their argument.
The first layer is historical memory. The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union pursued a policy of Russification toward the Turkic peoples, and that memory is far from academic. My generation of Baku residents knows the price of Moscow's special concern for its Turkic periphery: on the night of January 20, 1990, Soviet troops entered Baku, and more than 130 civilians were killed. Tatarstan, which passed a law in 1999 on switching to the Latin alphabet, was hit in 2002 with a federal amendment requiring the republics to use only Cyrillic, and in 2004 Russia's Constitutional Court upheld that rule. Meanwhile, the OTS is promoting a common Latin-based Turkic alphabet. It is hard to imagine an observer that bans at home exactly what the organization encourages.
The second layer is present-day politics. In August 2014, at the Seliger youth forum, Putin mused that the Kazakhs had never had a state of their own and that Nursultan Nazarbayev had created a state on territory where none had existed before. In August 2022, a post describing Kazakhstan as an artificial state appeared and quickly vanished from Dmitry Medvedev's social media page; his office blamed a hack. Since February 2022, Russia has been contesting Ukraine's borders by force, while the OTS's founding documents rest on respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. These two realities cannot be combined in one room without forcing one of them to give way.
Critics of the initiative in Baku also stress the practical side. Observer status carries no voting rights, but pressure, as experience shows, does just fine without a formal vote. An observer sits in on meetings, knows the agenda in advance, holds conversations on the sidelines and can play on disagreements among members, obstructing the formation of a common position. Add Russia's interests in the transportation and energy projects that OTS members are developing, and the picture is complete. In this logic, Turkic integration and the concept of the "Russian world" look like competing projects, and admitting one into the other's headquarters shifts the balance of power within the organization in Moscow's favor.
It would be a mistake to read Baku's position as anti-Russian. On February 22, 2022, Azerbaijan and Russia signed the Declaration on Allied Interaction in Moscow. The relationship then went through a severe crisis. On December 25, 2024, an AZAL Embraer 190 crashed near Aktau, killing 38 people, and only in October 2025, in Dushanbe, did Putin acknowledge that Russian air defense missiles had exploded near the airliner. In the summer of 2025 came raids on Azerbaijanis in Yekaterinburg, in which two people died. Putin called that period a "crisis of emotions." In June 2026, Foreign Ministers Sergei Lavrov and Jeyhun Bayramov announced full normalization, and on July 28 the two presidents held a phone call.
The conclusion Baku drew from this episode is simple. It needs steady bilateral relations with Moscow, and Azerbaijan has rebuilt them. At the same time, the Turkic architecture must remain a space without a Russian voice, because in 2025 it proved to be one of the pillars that allowed Baku to withstand pressure without bending. An ally on the doorstep is welcome. The same ally in the living room where defense and corridors are discussed is out of the question.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev did not travel to Ankara. His press office cited a busy schedule: on October 30, Baku hosted the awards ceremony for the finalists of the FIFA Under-15 World Cup and Festival. Azerbaijan, which chaired the OTS in 2025–2026 and was handing the chairmanship over to Turkey, was represented by Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov. Some Moscow commentators rushed to see this as a rift between Baku and Ankara. The Russian storyline showed the opposite: both capitals gave Tokayev's proposal the same answer, just in different voices. Baku said it plainly, while Ankara cited the charter.
Nearly Thirty Years of "Mediation": What Karabakh Taught Baku
Azerbaijanis of my generation need no explanation of what Russian participation becomes in formats where Moscow formally decides nothing. The OSCE Minsk Group, created in 1992, handled the Karabakh settlement for almost three decades, and from the mid-1990s Russia was one of its co-chairs, alongside the United States and France. Four UN Security Council resolutions adopted in 1993, Nos. 822, 853, 874 and 884, demanded the withdrawal of occupying forces from Azerbaijani territories, and they remained on paper. The mediator did not vote and signed nothing on the parties' behalf, yet for decades the conflict stayed frozen in a configuration that suited the mediator better than the parties themselves.
The resolution was secured by Azerbaijan itself. In 44 days in the fall of 2020, it liberated most of the occupied lands, and in September 2023 it fully restored sovereignty over all of its territory. The trilateral statement of November 10, 2020, included Point 9, which placed oversight of transportation links through Armenian territory under the Border Service of Russia's FSB. Moscow was counting on holding the key to the future route through Zangezur. Things turned out differently. On August 8, 2025, at the White House, Baku and Yerevan agreed on a route with American participation, and that same year the OSCE decided to close the Minsk process.
The lesson applies directly to the OTS. Status without a vote says nothing about real influence. As an observer in an organization whose flagship infrastructure project runs around its territory, Russia would have every interest in slowing that project down. It would not need a vote to do so.
Oil Through Novorossiysk: Tokayev's Insurance Policy
Kazakhstan shares a border of roughly 7,600 kilometers with Russia, the longest continuous land border in the world. About 80 percent of Kazakhstan's oil is exported through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium pipeline to the terminal near Novorossiysk. In 2025, the Tengiz–Novorossiysk system carried 70.52 million metric tons, more than half of which, 36.6 million, came from the Tengiz field alone. Kazakhstan's total oil exports that year amounted to 78.7 million tons. Alternatives exist, but on an entirely different scale: in 2025, 2.1 million tons went to Germany via the Druzhba pipeline.
Kazakhstan has felt the vulnerability of this artery in its own budget. In February 2025, seven drones attacked the Kropotkinskaya pumping station in Krasnodar Krai, and throughput of Kazakh oil temporarily fell by 30 to 40 percent. On November 29, 2025, uncrewed boats struck CPC's offshore infrastructure near Novorossiysk and knocked out a single point mooring. In August 2026, Astana lowered its oil production target for the year, citing CPC constraints. Ukraine strikes the pipe, Russia controls the pipe's route, and Kazakhstan's treasury pays for someone else's war.
Trade figures show the same asymmetry, although the two sides count differently. According to Kazakh statistics, trade with Russia in 2025 totaled $27.4 billion; Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk put it at $28.7 billion. The accounting methods differ by $1.3 billion, but the order of magnitude is the same: Russia accounted for about 30 percent of Kazakhstan's imports. Trade with Turkey that year came to $5.4 billion. Another detail is telling. According to Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry, in 2025 Kazakhstan invested about $2.2 billion in foreign direct investment in the Turkish economy, becoming the second-largest foreign investor in Turkey. Astana is putting its money on Ankara, but for now it lives within Russia's economic gravity.
The political debt has not gone away either. In January 2022, when protests in Kazakhstan escalated into unrest, Tokayev requested assistance from the CSTO, and a contingent of about two thousand troops, mostly Russian, entered the country. Moscow has since repeatedly held up their withdrawal some two weeks later as a model allied operation and as a reminder of whom the Akorda has to thank for its stability. Five months later, on June 17, 2022, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, sitting next to Putin, Tokayev declared that Kazakhstan does not recognize the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics." These two episodes contain Tokayev's entire formula: yield on form, hold firm on substance. June 2025 added Rosatom to that formula, when Astana chose it to lead the consortium building Kazakhstan's first nuclear power plant, even though China's CNNC, France's EDF and South Korea's KHNP were also competing for the contract.
The proposal in Ankara belongs to the same series. The gesture of loyalty cost Tokayev nothing: the OTS charter and Baku's position guaranteed that the invitation would never materialize. Meanwhile, he has earned credit with the Kremlin.
A Brake on a Turkic Army
The second motive is less visible and, in my view, more important than the first. In Ankara, Tokayev specifically emphasized that the OTS is not a military alliance and should not become one; he had said the same in May in Turkistan. The addressee of those words is obvious. On October 7, 2025, at the 12th summit in Gabala, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev called on the Turkic states to act as a "single center of power" and proposed holding joint military exercises of OTS countries in Azerbaijan in 2026. In September 2026, the "Unity Force 2026" exercises began at Azerbaijani training grounds with troops from Azerbaijan, Turkey and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan was not on the list. The 163-point Ankara Declaration speaks of cooperation in defense and cybersecurity, and Turkey is discussing the creation of a joint defense industry college for the Turkic states.
This trajectory is inconvenient for Astana. Kazakhstan is a member of the CSTO, its military is tied to Russian supplies and standards, and any move by the OTS toward a military bloc confronts Tokayev with a choice he does everything to avoid. He does not want to vote against it: openly crossing Ankara and Baku is too costly. A Russian observer would solve the problem more subtly, because the mere prospect of discussing joint exercises in the presence of a Russian diplomat would cool the participants' enthusiasm. A brake that works without anyone pressing the pedal.
Similar logic applies to Northern Cyprus. Turkey is seeking international recognition for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which has held observer status in the OTS since 2022. The Central Asian capitals are not prepared to follow Ankara: in the spring of 2025, at the EU–Central Asia summit in Samarkand, they reaffirmed in a joint declaration their commitment to UN Security Council resolutions calling for nonrecognition of Northern Cyprus. The louder Ankara's voice within the organization, the more often Astana will have to choose between Turkic solidarity and its relations with Brussels. It needs a counterweight precisely so that such choices arise less often.
A Corridor That Bypasses Russia, with Russia at the Table
The OTS's main economic project is the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the Middle Corridor, which links China with Europe via Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. The World Bank sees its development as an opportunity for Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia to reduce their dependence on routes through Russia. The trend is both impressive and sobering. In 2019, the route carried 759,000 tons of cargo; in 2022, after the war in Ukraine began, 1.485 million; in 2023, 2.764 million; and in 2024, a record 4.484 million tons. In 2025, volume declined for the first time in five years, to 4.119 million tons, although the container segment grew to roughly 77,000 twenty-foot equivalent units. The target for 2029 is 300,000 containers.
Kazakhstan is investing in the route seriously: in 2025, it completed second tracks along the 836-kilometer Dostyk–Moiynty section and a bypass line around Almaty station. Uzbekistan increased its shipments along the corridor to 1.2 million tons, and the Middle Corridor's share of Uzbek trade with the European Union rose from 12 percent in 2021 to 28 percent in 2025. Every such figure represents cargo that did not pass through Russian territory.
Such an arrangement is, by definition, unacceptable to Russia. Observer status would give Moscow access to the discussions where tariffs, schedules and port investments are coordinated, in other words, to the inner workings of a competing route. That is exactly what Turkey fears. Even pro-government Turkish commentators who saw Tokayev's initiative as a chance to strengthen ties with Russia's Turkic peoples and counterbalance China warn that Moscow would gain leverage to hold back the Middle Corridor and Central Asia's defense cooperation with Ankara.
Kazakhstan itself has no intention of giving up Russian transit. The main theme of the July forum in Omsk was building a global logistics ecosystem and the Russia–Kazakhstan–China routes. According to the Kazakh Finance Ministry's planning estimates, total transit through the country in 2025 was expected to reach about 34 million tons, an order of magnitude more than the entire Trans-Caspian route. Astana is building a bypass while simultaneously selling transit that bypasses the bypass. In this arrangement, a Russian observer would serve as insurance for both sides: Moscow sees what is being built without it, and Astana demonstrates that nothing is being built against it.
The Hungarian Precedent: Ankara's Weak Spot
In fairness, I should acknowledge that supporters of Russian participation have an argument that Ankara will find harder to answer than it seems. Hungary received observer status in the OTS back in 2018, even though Hungarian is not a Turkic language. Formally, Ankara can point to the clause about "related" languages, into which Hungarian fits with some stretching, but the stretch is plain to see. Moscow will remember this precedent and bring it up when the occasion arises.
The answer lies in politics. Budapest is a member of the European Union and NATO, is not at war with its neighbors and does not contest anyone's borders, and its presence extended the Turkic agenda westward, toward European markets and institutions. A Russian presence would hem it in from the north.
Baku and Astana would do well to recall a second precedent. In 2005, Russia obtained observer status in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, justifying it by the country's multimillion Muslim population, which is exactly the demographic logic Tokayev has now applied to the Turks. Moscow knows how to turn demography into an admission ticket. The difference is one of scale. The OIC unites 57 states, and a single observer dissolves in such a gathering. The OTS has five members and a consensus rule, and in a room that size every extra person carries disproportionate weight.
Multivector Diplomacy as a Profession
Since February 2022, Central Asia has accelerated the diversification of its foreign ties while maintaining cooperation with Russia, and Tokayev's initiative fits this pattern perfectly. Kyrgyzstan, like Kazakhstan, belongs to the CSTO and the Eurasian Economic Union, hosts a Russian air base in Kant, and, according to its National Bank, received more than 92 percent of its remittances from Russia in 2025. In June 2026, Uzbekistan and Russia broke ground on the first unit of a nuclear power plant, while Tashkent is simultaneously developing defense industry cooperation with Turkey. In January 2026, Tashkent and Ankara held a joint meeting of ministers and intelligence chiefs on foreign policy and security.
Tashkent is the main unknown in this story. By decision of the Council of Heads of State, Uzbek diplomat Mirvokhid Azimov has been appointed the new secretary general of the OTS, succeeding Kubanychbek Omuraliev, and Uzbekistan will host the 14th summit in 2027. In Ankara, Mirziyoyev spoke about developing "OTS Plus" but never once mentioned Russia. Tashkent's silence on this question speaks louder than any loud statement: until the Uzbek side publicly backs the idea, it remains Astana's private initiative.
For Turkey, which took over the organization's chairmanship from Azerbaijan on October 30, the situation looks different. Ankara now has a year in which every OTS meeting will take place under its leadership, and it is unlikely to spend that year debating membership for a country that does not meet the organization's own criteria. Turkey will more likely push the agenda for which it convened the summit: the declaration on the Turkic century, the common alphabet, the investment fund and the 2027–2031 strategy, whose swift adoption, incidentally, Tokayev himself called for.
Moscow Has Already Won, Even If It Is Turned Down
The Kremlin risks nothing in this game. Acceptance would give it a seat in the room where transportation and defense are discussed. Rejection gives it a narrative: the Turkic bloc has shut Russia out and must therefore be directed against it. That narrative is easy to sell to its own audiences in Kazan and Ufa and to use as a wedge between Astana and the Ankara–Baku tandem.
Tokayev comes out ahead as well. He demonstrated loyalty to Moscow at no cost to himself and, at the same time, reminded Ankara that Kazakhstan has an alternative to Turkish leadership in the Turkic world. There is only one loser in this scheme: the cohesion of the OTS itself, which will have to spend some of its political capital on politely turning down one of its founders.
My forecast is specific. Before the 14th summit in Uzbekistan in 2027, Russia will receive neither observer status nor an "OTS Plus" meeting at the level of heads of state. Contacts between the six Russian republics and TURKSOY will not be restored before the end of 2027 either, because the Kremlin will not agree to a format in which Tatarstan and Yakutia deal with the Turkic world directly, bypassing the federal center. Tokayev himself will not publicly return to his idea at the next summit. It has already served its purpose.
The Ankara Declaration was signed in five languages: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Uzbek. Russian was not among them. As he signed the Kazakh text, Tokayev apparently understood better than anyone in the hall that it would not be among them in 2027 either.