The war in Ukraine and the sanctions that followed it redrew the geo-economic map of Eurasia almost overnight. Supply chains assembled over decades were severed, and for Central Asia — a region long held within Moscow’s orbit — the disruption opened new possibilities and imposed difficult choices at the same time. One consequence has been a rising premium on middle powers: states that make no claim to superpower status but can project influence beyond their borders and offer partners a credible alternative. Turkey has become the most visible of them in Central Asia.
Has Turkish policy in the region genuinely changed since February 2022, and what determines its successes and its limits? The argument advanced here is that 2022 produced not a break but an acceleration: it gave Ankara, in the space of months, the opening that three decades of effort had failed to secure, and it pushed a strategy long built on cultural affinity towards harder and more practical instruments.
From Pan-Turkism to pragmatism
Turkey was the first state to recognize the independence of the five Turkic-speaking republics in 1991. President Turgut Özal staked his policy on shared ethnic and linguistic roots and famously predicted that the twenty-first century would belong to Turkey. In 1992 his successor, Süleyman Demirel, toured the region with a one-billion-dollar credit line, draft constitutions, and a proposal that the republics leave the rouble zone.
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This insistent patronage soon met its limits. The new states declined to join bodies with supranational powers; Ankara’s positions on Nagorno-Karabakh and on Northern Cyprus created friction (Avatkov, 2021, in Russian); and the Trans-Caspian gas pipeline from Turkmenistan gave way to a long-term Turkish contract with Russia. By the late 1990s Turkey had effectively accepted a marginal political role.
The Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2002, changed the method rather than the goal. Grand political design was replaced by institution-building and the patient cultivation of local elites, framed by Ahmet Davutoğlu’s doctrine of strategic depth. The stalling of European Union accession talks, the fallout of the Arab Spring, and the failed coup of July 2016 then pushed Ankara towards a broader pivot to Eurasia (Ibadov, 2025, in Russian). The foreign ministry’s 2019 “Asia Anew” initiative recast Turkey not as a bridge to the West but as a center of gravity in its own right. Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 Karabakh war gave that claim credibility.
The Middle Corridor
After 2022 the northern route through Russian territory became commercially and politically awkward, while the escalation of the Arab–Israeli conflict in late 2023 reduced the security of southern routes through the Middle East. The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route—the Middle Corridor—was the residual option, linking China and Europe through Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey.
For Europe the corridor is a way of trading with Asia without crossing Russia; for Kazakhstan, above all, it is a means of diversifying exports. Turkey, which controls its western section, became an indispensable partner to both ends of the route. Ankara has modernized the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway and promoted trans-Caspian ferry links, drawing the region’s economies into its logistical orbit.
Its role, however, is narrower than the political rhetoric suggests. Turkey has not become a significant investor in the corridor’s infrastructure, and its energy companies remain largely passive in upstream and pipeline projects abroad. Geography and the alliance with Azerbaijan, rather than capital, underpin Ankara’s claim to be a future gas hub for Eurasia (Tolegen, 2024).
Institutions and soft power
The Organization of Turkic States (OTS) grew out of the 2009 Nakhchivan Agreement and took its present form at the Istanbul summit of 2021, which extended its remit to defense and security (Tolegen, 2024). Its 2040 vision document describes free movement of goods, capital, services, and people along broadly European lines; the Samarkand summit of November 2022 adopted a four-year strategy and created a Turkic Investment Fund in Istanbul, an implicit counterweight to the Russian- and Chinese-led bodies operating in the same space.
Underneath the institutions sits a dense soft-power apparatus. The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA) has worked in the region since 1992; the Yunus Emre Institute teaches Turkish language and culture; the Türkiye Scholarships program supports some 14,500 students, and roughly 35,000 Central Asians study at Turkish universities. The Maarif Foundation, created in 2016, was Ankara’s answer to the Gülenist school networks it wanted dismantled after the coup attempt and, for host governments wary of unsupervised religious education, a state-run and predictable alternative. Its regional record is uneven: the only fully operating branch is in Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere Maarif schools have not always displaced their predecessors (Velieva, in Russian).
Drones as the game-changer
The decisive shift has been military. The 2020 Karabakh War functioned as a global showcase for Turkish equipment, and for elites schooled in Soviet doctrine, the performance of the Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) demonstrated that a non-superpower could supply weapons that change battlefield outcomes. Ankara sells without the political conditionality associated with Western suppliers or the debt exposure associated with Chinese finance. Kyrgyzstan bought Turkish UAVs after its border clashes with Tajikistan; Kazakhstan has reported acquisitions of its own; Turkmenistan is a substantial customer and has relied on Turkish patrol vessels for its Caspian fleet since 2011. The 2022 agreement between Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAŞ) and Kazakhstan Engineering to assemble ANKA drones in Kazakhstan went further, tying an industrial base to Turkish standards. Around 1,800 officers from Turkic-speaking states have trained in Turkey, and in April 2022 even Tajikistan signed a framework agreement on military cooperation.
The effect is cumulative. Where television serials and lycées once bought sympathy among populations, drones and armored vehicles now buy standing with general staffs—a hard-power complement that gives Turkish soft power a purchase it previously lacked.
The constraints
These gains rest on a narrow base. Economically Turkey is outclassed. Its trade with Kazakhstan reached about 6.4 billion dollars in 2023 and with Uzbekistan roughly 3 billion (Observer Research Foundation, 2025); Kazakhstan’s turnover with China in the same year was 31.5 billion dollars by Kazakh statistics and higher still by Chinese figures. Accumulated Turkish investment in Kazakhstan, the largest in the region, stands at about four billion dollars and is concentrated in catering, retail, and construction—visible, but light. Beijing’s economic weight sets a ceiling that no amount of diplomacy will lift, and Chinese sensitivity over Xinjiang keeps Turkish rhetoric about Turkic solidarity carefully calibrated.
In security, Russia and China remain the reference points. Turkey has no record of independent peacekeeping, a thin legal and institutional framework for crisis response, and membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that sits awkwardly beside the region’s participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
The republics themselves impose the firmest limits. Multi-vector diplomacy means avoiding dependence on Ankara as much as on Moscow or Beijing; none has aligned with Turkey on Northern Cyprus or Nagorno-Karabakh. Tajikistan, Persian-speaking, prefers the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the CSTO; neutral Turkmenistan remains an OTS observer (Dmitrieva, Kudriavtsev, and Troshenkov, 2025). Governments across the region also resist anything resembling cultural Turkification, and the linguistic kinship Ankara invokes is thinner than advertised: Turkish belongs to the Oghuz branch, Uzbek to the Karluk, Kazakh and Kyrgyz to the Kipchak (Gadzhieva, in Russian). Turkey’s use of the OTS to secure observer status for Northern Cyprus and talk of an “Army of Turan” have reinforced the suspicion that the platform serves Ankara’s agenda first.
A final vulnerability is personal. Much of the strategy’s momentum derives from the standing of the current president, and a post-Erdoğan Turkey may find Turkic integration harder to drive.
Conclusion
What 2022 altered was tempo rather than direction. The ambitions Ankara declared in 1991 have survived largely intact, but the means of pursuing them have narrowed and hardened: influence now travels through freight corridors, defense contracts, and treaty-based institutions rather than through appeals to shared descent. That is a smaller program than Özal’s and a considerably more durable one.
Its ceiling, though, is set elsewhere. Turkey has managed what few middle powers do—converting cultural proximity into working political leverage—yet it operates in a region where China supplies the capital, Russia still underwrites the security arrangements, and five governments have made a principle of committing fully to neither. Ankara has made itself useful to all of them and indispensable to none. That is a real position in Central Asia, and it is not a commanding one.
