The final months of 2025 heightened Ankara’s anxiety as the Russia-Ukraine war spilled into the Black Sea and Turkish airspace. Turkey shot down a drone that violated its airspace and recovered two more crashed, Russian-made drones within five days, prompting warnings to the warring parties to show greater restraint in the Black Sea. The incidents came at an especially delicate moment for Turkey’s relations with both Washington and Moscow. Ankara is eager to reset defense ties with the United States and resolve the S-400 dispute, which led to US sanctions under the Trump administration. One option under consideration is returning the S-400s to Russia—a step that could anger President Putin just as Turkey seeks to reduce its dependence on Russian energy, even though that dependence remains substantial. At the same time, Turkey is under growing pressure from the US and Europe over its defense and energy links with Russia, while Washington is also pushing Ankara to play a mediating role in ending the war. The result is a tightening triangle: Moscow, Washington, and Ankara.
Key questions now loom: Can Turkey sustain this three-way balancing act? Where does Ankara stand on Trump’s peace plan, which would require Ukraine to cede territory to Russia? How does Moscow view Turkey’s S-400 dilemma? And what would the continuation of the Russia-Ukraine war mean for Turkey’s security—and for its already strained relations with the West?
Speaker Biographies
Dr. Evren Balta
Professor of Comparative Politics and International Politics, Özyeğin University
Philip H. Gordon
Sydney Stein, Jr. Scholar, Brookings
Andrew S. Weiss
James Family Chair and Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Dr. Gönül Tol (Moderator)
Senior Fellow, Middle East Institute
Extended Speaker Biographies
Dr. Evren Balta is a professor of Comparative Politics and International Politics at Özyeğin University. Dr. Balta’s research covers various topics in political science, focusing on security, internal conflict, Turkish foreign policy, populism, and citizenship, with her work appearing in leading journals such as Democratisation, Party Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Sociology. Dr. Balta is the Academic Coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum and actively advises civil society and political parties in Turkey. She also contributes to domestic and international media on issues related to democracy and Turkish foreign policy.
Philip H. Gordon is the Sydney Stein, Jr. Scholar in the Foreign Policy Program’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at Brookings. In previous roles, Gordon served as Assistant to the President and National Security Adviser to the Vice President in the White House from March 2022 to January 2025. In that role, he advised President Biden and Vice President Harris on the full range of US national security issues and was a regular participant in meetings of the National Security Council, Principals Committee, Deputies Committee, and President’s Daily Brief.
Andrew S. Weiss is the James Family Chair and Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia. Prior to joining Carnegie, he was director of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Russia and Eurasia and executive director of the RAND Business Leaders Forum. Weiss previously served as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council staff, as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and as a policy assistant in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush.
Dr. Gönül Tol
Gönül Tol is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, where she focuses on Turkish politics, US-Turkey relations and regional dynamics in the Middle East. A frequent commentator, Dr. Tol has written extensively on Turkish domestic and foreign policy for publications such as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The Financial Times. Her articles include “Turkey Is Now a Full-Blown Autocracy” in Foreign Affairs (March 2025), “The Indispensable Erdogan” in The New York Times and “Erdogan Sees Nothing But Opportunity in Syria” in The Financial Times (December 2024). She is the author of Erdogan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria(Oxford University Press, 2023).
Erdogan and Putin, the End of an Unlikely Partnership
