Why the fate of Russia’s seat in the Organization of Turkic States cannot be decided without Baku

Tokayev’s proposal to bring Russia into the Organization of Turkic States was no stray remark. It is the outcome of a decade in which the Kremlin steadily unplugged Kazan, Ufa and Yakutsk from the Turkic world, and now Moscow wants a seat at the Turkic table for itself.

A minister instead of a president

On October 30, the 13th summit of the Organization of Turkic States opened in Ankara. Its slogan read like a manifesto: “The Turkic Century: Unity in Language, Thought and Action.” The chairmanship was passing from Azerbaijan to Türkiye, and protocol called for a day of two presidents, one handing over and one taking charge.

Azerbaijan’s chair was taken by Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov. Ilham Aliyev, one of the organization’s most consistent builders, did not come to Ankara, even though Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had invited him personally by phone on October 21. Azerbaijani news agencies attributed his absence to previously scheduled events in Baku. Reuters and AP, along with a number of Azerbaijani outlets, linked it to the tension that followed criticism in Türkiye of Baku’s decision to restrict headscarves in schools. Opening the summit, Erdoğan said there was no place in the Turkic world for division or discord.

It was in this hall that the summit produced the proposal it will be remembered for.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said that, to raise the organization’s standing, “it would be a correct and fair decision to respond positively to Russia’s intention (emphasis added by 1news.az) and invite it to join this format or to take part in the activities of the OTS as an observer.” Moscow had made no public statement of any such intention.

No decision was taken. The 163-point Ankara Declaration endorsed the OTS+ mechanism but says nothing about Russia.

The Kremlin replied three days later. Dmitry Peskov said there had been no official invitation, but that the topic would “surely” come up in contacts, “including with Astana.” He called Russia’s participation in such an organization “entirely understandable, expedient and natural,” since the country has regions whose peoples are historically Turkic. And he added a caveat that went almost unnoticed in the first news reports: what is at issue is participation not by individual Russian regions but by the Russian Federation as a whole.

That caveat explains why Moscow needed a seat at a table that had been assembled without it, and why someone else had to ask for that seat on its behalf.

The bridge through Kazan

Twelve years ago, the question of how Russia connects to the Turkic world had a different answer. In 2014 Kazan was the Cultural Capital of the Turkic World, the third after Astana and Eskişehir. That November, as the year drew to a close, Tatarstan’s president Rustam Minnikhanov hosted Ramil Hasanov, secretary general of the Turkic Council. According to the secretariat, Hasanov said Tatarstan would become a bridge between the Turkic world and the Russian Federation.

That bridge had been under construction since the early 1990s. The 1994 treaty between Mintimer Shaimiev and Boris Yeltsin gave Tatarstan the right to take part in international relations. Russia was not a member of TURKSOY, the International Organization of Turkic Culture, but six of its republics (Altai, Bashkortostan, Sakha, Tatarstan, Tuva and Khakassia) held observer status there. Russia’s Turkic peoples entered Turkic institutions not through Moscow but on their own, through their own capitals.

In November 2015, after the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian Su-24 over Syria, that arrangement ended with a single telegram. Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky demanded that the heads of the six republics “immediately cease all contacts of Russia’s constituent entities” with TURKSOY. The organization’s secretary general, Dyusen Kaseinov, said he had learned about it from the newspapers. Ufa, which had been discussed as the next Cultural Capital of the Turkic World, never became one.

After that, the bridge was taken apart piece by piece.

In 2017 the treaty on the division of powers expired, and the Kremlin never answered Kazan’s proposal to negotiate a new one. The same year, a law made Tatar an elective subject in schools. On January 1, 2023, sovereignty and republican citizenship were removed from Tatarstan’s constitution, and the title of president was changed to “rais.”

Peskov’s words about Russia “as a whole” close this chapter. A bridge between the Turkic world and Russia still exists, but over twelve years it has passed from Kazan’s hands into Moscow’s. Now Moscow wants to stand on it itself, and to do so inside the OTS.

Three layers of one policy: how Russia builds its relations with the Turkic world

Tatarstan has not vanished from the Turkic world; it has changed. In November 2022 Minnikhanov came to Baku for the first time since March 2011, shortly after a visit by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. Two more visits followed over the next two years. In December 2024 Aliyev awarded him the Dostlug (Friendship) Order for developing friendship between Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation, and Tatarstan’s leader replied that he valued the ties “within the framework of Russian-Azerbaijani relations.” Eight days later an AZAL airliner crashed near Aktau, relations between Moscow and Baku entered a prolonged crisis, and Minnikhanov made no further public visits to Baku.

Kazan turned out to be a barometer rather than a bridge: its Turkic activity picks up when Moscow needs Baku and dies down when relations break down.

The other Turkic republics work the same way, and the arrangement has three layers.

The first layer, the economy, is permitted. Tatarstan’s trade with Türkiye, for example, reached $4 billion in the first nine months of 2024. In July 2025, at the height of the Russian-Azerbaijani standoff, Erdoğan received Minnikhanov in Ankara. According to the Kazan Kremlin, it was the Turkish president who proposed the meeting.

For Bashkortostan, meanwhile, Türkiye was the second-largest foreign trade partner in 2024, and the republic keeps a representative in Istanbul.

The second layer, institutions, is shut off.

Since Medinsky’s telegram, open sources show no evidence that the republics have resumed contacts with TURKSOY. Researchers at INION, an institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, note that engagement with Türkiye in Altai, Tuva and Khakassia has dropped markedly since 2015. They themselves describe Russia’s Turkic peoples as objects vulnerable to outside influence and propose writing measures against Turkish influence into the national ethnic policy strategy. In January 2024, when thousands of people in Baymak came out in defense of the Bashkir activist Fail Alsynov, the republic’s head Radiy Khabirov declared that the protesters were calling for Bashkortostan to secede. Ethnicity had become a security matter.

The third layer, symbols, Moscow is taking for itself.

Kazan, the Turkic world’s capital of 2014, became the Cultural Capital of the Islamic World in 2026. It was Vladimir Putin who announced, at the SCO summit in Bishkek, that the 2028 World Nomad Games would be held in Kazan, and the bid was filed by Russia, not Tatarstan. In Altai, the “Altai, Ancestral Homeland of the Turks” forum has been held two years running under the auspices of the Russian Military Historical Society and the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, with greetings from the presidents of Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Military Historical Society is headed by the same Vladimir Medinsky. The president of Altai State University says plainly that this research helps counter the idea of pan-Turkism. It was this very project, “Altai, the cradle of Turkic civilization,” that Tokayev cited in Ankara as an argument in Russia’s favor.

In this design, an observer seat in the OTS seals the second layer. Until 2015, Russia’s Turkic peoples sat in Turkic organizations themselves. After 2026, Moscow intends to sit there in their place.

Two hopes for one chair

Over ten years, Moscow’s attitude toward the OTS has moved from condescension to alarm. In 2016 Sergei Lavrov allowed for participation in the Turkic Council if it changed its rules. In 2021, when Turkish nationalist leader Devlet Bahçeli presented Erdoğan with a map of the “Turkic world” that took in part of Russian territory, Peskov answered with irony: the center of the Turkic world is “not in Türkiye, it is on the territory of the Russian Federation, in Altai.” By early 2026, as Andrey Buzarov writes in Türkiye Today, Lavrov was already saying that Moscow sees the organization and is following it closely. In December 2025, at the launch of a monograph in Kazan reported by Kommersant, Russian experts described pan-Turkism as a NATO instrument.

Out of that alarm grew the first hope for the observer’s chair, Moscow’s.

Buzarov notes that some Russian analysts consider Turkic integration unstoppable and propose being “inside the process” in order to slow down unwelcome decisions and steer its course. Tatyana Poloskova, a doctor of political science, put it this way in an interview with News.az: even observer status gives the right to take part in discussions and to influence the agenda.

The second hope lives on the other side of the table. Its proponents believe that Russia, once given a seat, will stop seeing the organization as a threat and stop getting in its way. Azerbaijani MP Gudrat Hasanguliyev fully backed Tokayev and warned that a refusal could turn the OTS into an organization with a name but no substance. The pragmatists have their own arithmetic: Kazakhstan shares one of the longest land borders in the world with Russia, Azerbaijan borders it too, and an irritated neighbor costs more than an included one.

Both hopes cannot come true at once. Either Russia softens by sitting at the table, or it becomes a brake from within. The mechanics settle the argument. An observer has no vote. Russian political scientist Sergei Markedonov, speaking to ArmInfo, compared such status to the NATO-Russia Council: you can discuss, but you cannot decide.

But Azerbaijani MP Elman Nasirov points out that in geopolitics an observer sometimes does more than observe. He also notes a paradox: the Middle Corridor was built largely as an alternative to routes through Russia, and now Russia is being invited into the room where that corridor is discussed.

There is also a third position, which sets the question aside for now. Azerbaijani political analyst Elkhan Shahinoglu pointed to the war in Ukraine: as long as it goes on, he said, Russian participation, even as an observer, would damage the organization’s reputation and should be put off for years to come.

Around the table: what do the members think?

It is no accident that the proposal came from Astana. Kazakh Turkologist Madi Raimov believes the initiative went through preliminary consultations, and that Kazakhstan acted as the intermediary because the proposal had to come from a Turkic state. Yet Astana cannot be called Moscow’s mouthpiece. In the same speech Tokayev hailed Türkiye as one of the most important countries in the world and repeated that the OTS must not become a military alliance.

That line was aimed at Baku’s security agenda no less than at Moscow. Kazakhstan’s trade with OTS countries, according to Tokayev, has approached $10 billion, up 40% in a year. Astana is hedging its Turkic vector, not abandoning it.

Bishkek is the closest to Moscow: the CSTO, the EAEU, a Russian base. There was no official reaction to the proposal there, but it was Sadyr Japarov, opening the Nomad Games in August, who announced that the Russian side had sent a formal letter confirming Tatarstan’s readiness to host the 2028 Games, and that Kyrgyzstan stood ready to help. Bishkek is unlikely to object to a Russian seat.

Tashkent sits at an equal distance from both poles and now carries more weight in the organization than ever. In Ankara, Uzbek diplomat Mirvokhid Azimov was appointed OTS secretary general, and Uzbekistan will host the next summit in 2027. Shavkat Mirziyoyev said nothing about Russia. He proposed something else: developing cooperation with third countries in the OTS+ format through sectoral ministerial meetings and political consultations. That amounts to an invitation to Russia at the ministerial level, with no seat at the table. Uzbek professor Azamat Seitov remarked that serious diplomacy often calls for silence.

The observers sit farther from the center, but the balance among them has shifted too.

Neutral Turkmenistan is on good terms with Kazan and will not object. Northern Cyprus speaks with the same voice as Ankara. And Hungary, which under Viktor Orbán could have been a natural ally of the Russian idea inside the OTS, has been governed since April 2026 by Péter Magyar. During his election campaign the new prime minister set the “Turkic councils” against Hungary’s European future. Moscow lost a potential ally at the table in the very year it asked for a place there.

Ankara, the summit host and new chair, has said nothing officially. Erdoğan has his own relationship with Putin, and an open refusal to Russia would not serve him. But a Russian observer would be the first player at the table comparable to Türkiye in weight. Turkish political scientist Emre Diner summed up Ankara’s likely line: neither reject cooperation with Russia outright nor accept it unconditionally, while keeping the organization’s decisions in its own hands.

That leaves the chair occupied not by the president… but by [Azerbaijan’s] minister.

Azerbaijan as guardian of autonomy?

Azerbaijan has more to lose in this story than the others. It was Baku that steadily pulled the organization from a cultural union toward a strategic one. In 2024, in Shusha, Ilham Aliyev spoke of turning the OTS into an influential global force. In 2025 he proposed joint military exercises for OTS states. In September 2026 the secretaries of the member states’ security councils met in Baku, and Aliyev called this cooperation long-term and strategic.

It is this agenda, above all, that a Russian observer could hold back.

Yet the door through which Tokayev proposed letting Russia in was built under Azerbaijan. The decision to launch the OTS+ format was signed at the Gabala summit in October 2025, at the start of Azerbaijan’s chairmanship. In March 2026 the foreign ministers approved the regulation on cooperation with third parties in that format. Baku has another lever as well: decisions in the OTS are taken by consensus. Northern Cyprus was granted observer status in 2022 unanimously, according to the Turkish foreign ministry. Azerbaijan can say “yes” to Moscow’s initiative in a format it helped create, and still withhold consent to the chair. Officially, Baku has so far kept silent.

That silence has two backdrops.

The first is a difficult year with Moscow: the AZAL crash, raids on Azerbaijanis in Yekaterinburg and the cancellation of all Russian cultural events in Azerbaijan in the summer of 2025, then the meeting in Dushanbe at which Putin for the first time acknowledged the role of Russian missiles in the loss of the plane. Relations have been normalized in form but not in substance.

The second backdrop is the dispute with Ankara. The school restrictions in Azerbaijan drew public criticism from Erdoğan’s chief adviser Oktay Saral and from MPs of Türkiye’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Azerbaijan’s ruling New Azerbaijan Party answered them with an official statement on October 13: it called the remarks irresponsible, urged the AKP to abandon its “harmful policy,” and recalled that the unity of the Muslim world rests not on hegemonic tendencies but on equality. The statement was widely picked up by the Azerbaijani and Turkish press, and outlets including Euronews and Middle East Eye reported on it. Baku barred more than 30 Turkish citizens from entering the country. Saral soon left his post, at Erdoğan’s request, by his own account, and on November 2 and 4, flying over Azerbaijan on the way to Seoul and back, Erdoğan had the pilot convey his congratulations on Victory Day and his best wishes to the brotherly Azerbaijani people and to President Ilham Aliyev personally.

As a result, two instincts are at work in Baku at once: to keep the Russian orbit out of the organization and to keep Ankara from becoming its master. At first glance they contradict each other, but the Azerbaijani debate has already found a common formula for both. MP Elman Nasirov, like many others in that debate, puts it this way: the OTS was not created against any state and must not become a sphere of influence of any great power. The line is usually read as an answer to Moscow. It is addressed just as much to Ankara.

This is the role that only Azerbaijan can play today: guardian of the organization’s autonomy from both poles. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have too many obligations to Moscow to tell it “no.” Türkiye is itself a pole. Uzbekistan borders neither Russia nor Türkiye, and finds it easier to stay silent. Azerbaijan borders both, argues with both as an equal, and has no intention of losing its ties with either.

The table matters more than the chair

The most likely outcome is already coming into view. Mirziyoyev’s proposal for sectoral meetings, Ankara’s caution and Baku’s interests converge on one point: Russia gets a place in the OTS+ format, but not observer status. Trade, transport and energy are discussed with Moscow in the ministers’ rooms, while at the table of the heads of state Russia is absent. Such an outcome humiliates no one and commits no one.

Yet the observer-status episode matters less for how it ends than for what it reveals. In ten years Moscow has traveled from a telegram that cut off its republics’ contacts with the Turkic world to a request, relayed through Astana, for a seat at the Turkic table.

An organization that Moscow long regarded as a cultural club can now be neither ignored nor stopped from outside. In that sense, Tokayev’s proposal was not a stray remark but a point on a long curve.

This curve has a weak spot, and it is not in Moscow. The strength of the OTS has always rested on Ankara and Baku speaking with one voice, and on Central Asia seeing that tandem as a support for its own independence. Moscow’s request was voiced on a day when a minister, not the president, sat in Azerbaijan’s chair.

The next summit will be held in Uzbekistan in 2027, and by then the question of the Russian chair will most likely be settled. The main question will be a different one: what Ankara is prepared to do so that, at the summit in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan’s chair is once again occupied by the president rather than a minister. Ilham Aliyev has put too much into building the organization for his absence from the table to be treated as a formality, and Ankara understands this.

Greetings from the cockpit make a fine gesture, but a gesture remains a gesture until diplomacy follows through, because without Azerbaijan the OTS puzzle does not come together, and Moscow understands that as well as Ankara does.

Note: it seems there will be a follow-through. While this article was being written, the Azerbaijani outlet Oxu.az reported that Erdoğan will come to Azerbaijan for the Victory Day celebrations on November 8, as he did a year ago, when he attended the festivities in Baku alongside President Aliyev.

Author: First News Political Review