Opinion | Why Russia and Turkey’s pursuit of past greatness should worry Asia

As Russia seeks to re-establish its Soviet-era sphere of influence and Turkey turns towards Central Asia, their opposing interests might soon collide

For China, Russo-Turkish tensions would destabilise Central Asia. For South and Southeast Asia, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman drive has bigger repercussions

Reading Time:4 minutes

Published: 1:30am, 8 Feb 2022Updated: 5:58am, 8 Feb 2022

Current events have provided two instances of history repeating itself. The first, and indisputably more dangerous, instance is the drive by President Vladimir Putin to restore Russia to the superpower status it enjoyed in Soviet times.

What is happening on Ukraine’s border is not about Russia feeling threatened but about Moscow seeking to re-establish its Soviet-era sphere of influence. What does Russia have to fear from its neighbours in Nato, a defensive alliance of countries that are preoccupied with their own concerns?

To those who have followed Russian history across the centuries, this pressure campaign is neither new nor surprising. Historically, Russia has been obsessed with seeking access to warm seas. It succeeded in reaching the Black Sea at the time of Catherine the Great, clinching Crimea from its nominal suzerain, the Ottoman sultan.

But this was not enough. After occupying the entire Eurasian land mass adjacent to its realm east of the Urals, swallowing up Turkish and Persian vassal states and reaching the Pacific, Russia still dreamed of ejecting the British from India, in a push to the Indian Ocean. (Thus prompting the Great Game, the British Empire’s desperate 19th-century attempt to block Russian progress south in Afghanistan). To keep Russia at arm’s length from the Mediterranean, England, France and Turkey fought the bloody Crimean war.

Then came the Russian expansion into the Balkans, which pitted St. Petersburg against two great powers of the age, the Austro-Hungarian empire and Ottoman Turkey. The first of the two conflicts was temporarily defused by the Congress of Berlin, which delineated the spheres of influence of both empires.

But Russia found it difficult to abide by these arrangements and stoked pan-Slav nationalism to grab more influence, leading eventually to the pistol shots in Sarajevo, and the first world war.

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