The Turkic world is not quite as united as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s talk of eternal brotherhood would suggest.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used the occasion of the opening of the 13th summit of the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS) in Ankara on October 30 to tell the various assembled leaders that there was “no room for separation, division or discord” in the Turkic world. It was a rather strange line given that there was a high profile absentee from the summit, namely Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president, who remained in Baku where (officially, at least) he was giving out trophies at the closing ceremony of a FIFA under-15 football tournament. It was the first OTS summit Aliyev has ever missed, sending his foreign minister, Jeyhun Bayramov, to take Azerbaijan’s seat at the summit table instead. A Turkish journalist, Deniz Zeyrek, reported that Aliyev’s absence was allegedly a like-for-like response to Erdoğan himself failing to show up at a regional security summit in Baku earlier in October, although the causes of the growing dispute run deeper, it would appear.
On October 12, Oktay Saral, an adviser to Erdoğan, criticised new rules in Azerbaijani schools that will see girls wearing headscarves kept out of classrooms. Aliyev’s government then responded by not allowing 31 Turkish nationals (journalists, politicians, and a handful of religious commentators among them) from entering the country, and on October 26 Saral resigned, more or less admitting that his remarks were the reason. Headscarves are probably the least of it, though, and Israel the more likely source of genuine dispute. Azerbaijan supplies roughly two-fifths of Israel’s crude-oil imports, much of it through a pipeline that passes through Türkiye. Erdoğan meanwhile walked out of Binyamin Netanyahu’s latest speech at the UN. Ilgar Velizade, an Azerbaijani analyst, said Aliyev’s government had no intention of changing course on Israel.
None of this prevented the OTS summit from producing an Ankara Declaration of 163 points that puts forward proposals for a defence industry college hosted by Türkiye (building on a roadmap the members’ defence industry chiefs agreed in Baku on October 1), a cybersecurity council, and closer work on the Middle Corridor (the trans-Caspian route that carries goods between China and Europe while avoiding Russia). It also backs the Zangezur link across southern Armenia, which Armenia’s parliament ratified as part of an American-brokered deal two days earlier, by 63 votes to 32. There was a paragraph on the rights of Turkish Cypriots, whose leader, Tufan Erhürman, was at the summit. Kurşad Zorlu, of Erdoğan’s ruling party, even floated a plan to treat footballers from Turkic states as domestic players in each other’s leagues.
The words that will be remembered most, however, came from Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kazakhstan’s president, who proposed inviting Russia either into the OTS+ format (which links the organisation with outside partners) or to join as an observer. He mentioned Russia’s centuries of ties with Turkic peoples, a Kremlin-backed heritage project in the Altai and, for good measure, the number of Russian words with Turkic roots. Vladimir Putin’s government has (so far) notably made no public request to join the OTS, in any capacity. Equally noteworthy was Tokayev saying that the organisation “is not, and must never become, a military alliance”.
Here he was repeating much that he had said in Turkistan in May, at an informal summit that was ostensibly about artificial intelligence. Daniyar Ashimbayev, a Kazakh political analyst, noted at the time that some of Tokayev’s fellow presidents kept pushing military co-operation, and that Erdoğan had spoken of supporting a “Turkish” (rather than Turkic) language model. Erdoğan has long campaigned for a common Latin-based alphabet. Tokayev’s response was to suggest a terminology commission, which is what one proposes when one would rather not adopt an alphabet (not withstanding the fact that Kazakhstan has been slowly moving from Cyrillic to Latin in recent years).
Rows, Russia, and alphabets aside, where the OTS does currently carry some weight (quite literally) is in freight. By Tokayev’s own figures, cargo through the Middle Corridor rose by 30 per cent in the first nine months of this year and transit traffic by 90 per cent, while Kazakhstan’s trade with the other OTS members is approaching ten billion US dollars, up by 40 per cent on 2025. Less impressive, at least so far, is the work of the Turkic Investment Fund, based in Istanbul, which has 600 million US dollars of capital, which sounds impressive until put next to the 12 billion euros that Ursula von der Leyen pledged to Central Asia in Samarkand in April 2025. The OTS also currently lacks anything resembling a common market, given that Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan apply the customs rules of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), while Georgia (through which the railway between Azerbaijan and Türkiye runs) and China (which generates much of the freight) are not members at all.
None of this is likely to stop Erdoğan continuing to make the organisation his own. The investment fund was his idea, as was admitting the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognised only by Türkiye, as an observer (Erdoğan has since pressed the other members, at summit after summit, to deepen ties with it). Between December 2024 and March 2025, however, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan all accredited envoys to the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus. Weeks later their presidents signed an EU declaration endorsing a UN resolution stating that Northern Cyprus’s secession is invalid. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, remain in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation, while Uzbekistan stays out of military blocs altogether.
Aliyev aside, one other notable absentee was Viktor Orbán, the former Hungarian prime minister who hosted an informal OTS summit in Budapest in May 2025. Hungary has been an OTS observer since 2018 and put money into the investment fund. Péter Magyar, who defeated Orbán in an election April, campaigned against what he called “Turkic councils”, and Hungary did not appear on the list of delegations in Ankara.
Photo: Dreamstime.