The lead-up to the June 14 NATO summit saw Turkey take a series of steps in the Black Sea region to impress its Western partners and defuse tensions with the Biden administration at the expense of irking Russia. In its increasingly wearying game of playing Washington and Moscow against each other, Turkey has now turned to soothing and assuring Russia.
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu hosted his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya on June 30 to discuss a broad range of issues, from regional conflicts and Turkey’s controversial purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense systems to joint vaccine production and the resumption of Russian tourist flows to Turkey. Ostensibly, Lavrov left the meeting with the impression that Turkey would not bow down to US pressure to ditch the S-400s as well as assurances that Canal Istanbul — a planned artificial waterway parallel to the Bosporus — would not disrupt the 1936 Montreux Convention, which Russia values as a safeguard restricting the access of Western naval forces to the Black Sea.