Steadily but surely, almost imperceptibly, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has in the past two years broken from his accommodation with Vladimir Putin.

At least that’s the contention of a good many Turkey analysts as the country’s president prepares to host the July 7-8 Nato leaders’ summit that should at long last bring Donald Trump to Ankara.

Turkey, and its leader of 23 years Erdogan, is a middle power that, ostentatiously, likes to punch above its weight. Crowd-pleasing strategic autonomy, always in appearance if not always in reality, is a must for any “strong” Turkish head of state. Hence, Erdogan’s overly showy meetings with Putin and other world leaders and displays of determinedly “sovereign” foreign policy, such as Ankara’s studied line that, despite the war raging all around, it will remain on amicable terms with both Kyiv and Moscow (incidences of Turkish companies providing the Ukrainians with drones and other weaponry and Ankara’s support for Ukraine’s desire to join Nato are taboo).

Some analysts, however, have detected a shift.

Gonul Tol, director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkish Program, is among them.

Earlier this month, in an article for Foreign Affairs – “Turkey’s Quiet Realignment: Russia’s Loss Is NATO’s Gain” – Tol observes: “Turkey’s growing cooperation with NATO has clearly unsettled Moscow. Despite repeated invitations, Putin has not visited Turkey since 2020.

“Turkish targets have also come under Russian fire in Ukraine and the Black Sea in recent years. Russian forces fired warning shots at a Turkish-owned cargo ship in the Black Sea in 2023. In 2025, Russia struck a Turkish-flagged LNG tanker in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa and attacked a Turkish Bayraktar drone facility near Kyiv.”

Turkey continues to present itself as a potential mediator between Russia and Ukraine, while growing frustrated with an uncompromising Russia that will not engage in the high-level talks necessary to end the war. But the growing distance between Erdogan and Putin is about much more than that.

As Tol writes: “Turkey’s economy and security remain firmly anchored to Europe and the United States, as has been true for decades. Erdogan sought to find an alternative by building a close relationship with Russia—but reality has now brought Turkey back.”

After launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin would have been heartened that even after such a display by the Kremlin of contempt for the international consensus, Turkey, though a member of Nato since 1952, stopped short of joining Western sanctions imposed on its Black Sea neighbour and then increasingly became an economic lifeline for Moscow. Russian-Turkish trade nearly doubled in 2022 to approximately $60bn, making Turkey Russia’s second-largest trading partner after China. As the war continued to intensify, Turkey soon became the third-largest importer of Russian fossil fuels.

The tide, however, is turning. The past two years, for instance, have seen Ankara cutting its dependence on Russian energy and showing more compliance with Western sanctions on “dual-use” goods exports to Russia, with both moves part of a switch to a closer alignment with the second Trump White House and more generally the West.

Ankara’s change in energy policy must be difficult to swallow for Moscow, for a key beneficiary is the US. Last year, Turkey agreed only one-year extensions on expiring Russian gas contracts, but in parallel agreed to a 15-year deal to purchase around 1,500 liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes from American companies.

With the cooling in Erdogan-Putin relations becoming more and more obvious to onlookers, commentaries endorsing the serving up of another blow to Moscow are becoming increasingly upbeat.

The Economist (“Why Turkey likes NATO again”) on June 9 wrote: “The good news, ahead of the [Ankara Nato] summit, is that Turkey is cooling on Russia. Mr Erdogan can see how Mr Putin is on the back foot. In the Black Sea, Russia’s navy has been crippled by Ukrainian attacks. In Syria its erstwhile client, Bashar al-Assad, was deposed over a year ago; Turkey is the country’s new go-to partner. In the Caucasus, Armenia’s democratic government is turning from Russia and pursuing normalisation with Turkey. Mr Erdogan, a regular guest in Russia in the 2010s, has not paid Mr Putin a visit in almost three years.”

For good measure, Tol, this time in a piece for The New York Times, asserted: “It’s clear that Ankara is no longer balancing between Moscow and NATO and is tilting the field against Mr. Putin. Russia’s decline has given Turkey, after a decade of deference to Moscow, the freedom to pursue its interests.”

POSTSCRIPT: Erdogan, as described by Turkish stand-up satirist Deniz Goktas, has over the years transformed from a “shy dictator” to a “dictator at peace with himself” (See IntelliNews’ Beyond the Bosporus report). Analysts, indeed, have declared the death of Turkey’s main opposition party at his hands (IntelliNews report, June 13).

But Europe doesn’t care. As touched on by the Economist article, “Nervous about America’s waning commitment to NATO, other alliance members are eager to keep Turkey onside. Europe is indulging Mr Erdogan even as he continues to snuff out Turkey’s democracy. (Mr Trump never pretended to care.)

“Other than Germany, no NATO government has addressed, let alone condemned, Mr Erdogan’s lawfare against his opponents. On May 21st a Turkish court ousted the leader of the country’s main opposition group, the Republican People’s Party. Europe was silent.”