Out of the Pan and Into the Fire: How Russian and Turkish Politics Brought Down Russia's SU-24

 When is a downed plane more than just a downed plane?

When that plane has some connection to Syria, which seems to be the convergence point of international politics today.

As soon as the Russian SU-24 was shot down on November 24, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that it was a “stab in the back by accomplices of the terrorists,” while Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed the right to protect its airspace. At a press conference with Francois Hollande, US president Barack Obama made his support for Turkey abundantly clear. Even presidential hopeful Marco Rubio has weighed in, warning, “It’s important for us to be very clear that we will respond and defend Turkey if they come under assault from the Russians.”

But to really understand the significance of the event, we need to take a closer look at Russia and Turkey. The event was the result of the confluence of the two countries’ internal and external political situations but can have significant repercussions for the region and beyond.

Out of the Pan…

The Syrian conflict has been going on since 2011, developing out of pro-democracy protests that began in March of that year. Since then a number of major powers have put their toes in, but have been reluctant to jump in with both feet—except Russia.

Here is where our story begins…at the moment Russia initiated air strikes in Syria, ostensibly in an effort to support the fight against ISIS.

It can be surmised that despite Russia’s claims, they were in Syria for other reasons than fighting ISIS. Over the past couple of months, Russian airstrikes have mostly targeted territories held by rebel groups fighting Bashar Al Assad, which brought Russia into conflict with a number of countries inside and outside the region. Back in early October, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a financial times article that even went so far as to recommend that the U.S. retaliate against Russia for its attacks on U.S. assets.

Russia’s involvement has had a two-fold objective:

1.       Divert attention away from Ukraine

2.       Project Russian power outside its near abroad

As the conflict in Ukraine dragged on with no clear victory in sight, and the Russian populace had to cope with the effects of U.S. and European sanctions (and a sub-40 dollar per barrel oil price), Russia needed something to take the focus off the unfulfilled promise of "Novorussia’s" separation from Ukraine.

Russia’s inability to close on its attempt to bring the Donetskaya Basin into Russia diminished the country’s image of power. And the Russian government couldn’t stomach the appearance of weakness before internal or external audiences.

So with the dream of "Novorussia" sputtering out, the Russian government needed to seek something farther afield, something that could project and image of the country’s former glory, an image that Putinism often drew upon. Since the solution to the Syrian conflict seemed to elude Europe and the United States—and the Middle Eastern powers were unwilling to take a major role—Syria appeared to be the perfect opportunity for Putin’s Regime to claim a significant victory.

…And Into the Fire

Things didn’t go as planned. The situation was more complicated than Putin’s regime expected. In supporting Assad’s forces against the rebels, Russia found itself attacking the Kurds who the Americans supported, the Turkomans who the Turkish government claimed an alliance with, and various other rebel forces that regional actors had staked their claims on.

We might, however, say that this could have been the plan all along—as a method of changing the game in Syria and forcing the various international forces to accept a deal brokered with the Assad regime, and Russia’s place at the head of the big table, the solver of problems and grand negotiator.

For such a plan to succeed the Russian government had to imagine the NATO allies as unlikely to answer its provocations.

Despite Russia’s claim that its plane was in Syrian airspace, Turkey has produced a map of where the radar had detected the plane. Turkey’s explanation was also supported by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and stated that the incursion couldn’t have been an accident. As such, we might suggest that the plane’s flight path had been an effort to provoke Turkey.

In fact, Russia’s previous actions in Europe might serve as evidence to support this interpretation.

A 2014 report published by the European Leadership Network noted “68 ‘hot’ identification and interdiction missions along the Lithuanian border alone, and Latvia recorded more than 150 incidents of Russian planes approaching its airspace. Estonia recorded 6 violations of its airspace in 2014.” A major submarine hunt took place in Swedish waters prompted by credible reports of Russian underwater activity. An armed Russian aircraft approached the Danish island of Bornholm in June 2014. These are only a few of the incidents outlined in the report.

And all of these incidents point to a pattern of provocation and an attempt to project Russia’s international military prowess. They make the statement that Russia will not accept that its sphere of influence has shrunk just to its near abroad.

The Turkish Gambit

At the same time Russia was seeking to extend its power abroad, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan was attempting to salvage his declining popularity.

Freedom house and Reporters without Borders have noted Turkey’s movement away from democracy in the past few years, with attacks on media and civil society institutions. An important moment of resistance to this movement could be found in the 2013 Gezi Park protests in which some of the frustrations in society were brought to the fore of discussion through a group of youths who took to the streets in downtown Istanbul.

As Erdogan (then Turkish Prime Minister) found his power challenged more and more following the Gezi Park protests, he fought back with harsher methods and came to be seen as a loose cannon. Even Turkey’s then President Abdulla Gul, who had formerly been close to the Erdogan, seemed to distance himself from the leader.

A critical juncture in the situation occurred in June 2015 when Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) had been unable to win enough votes to form its own government and had found itself unable to create a coalition with the other parties in the parliament.

The result of the inability to create a coalition was that new parliamentary elections were to be held on November 1. Erdogan and AKP knew that to gain the desired number of votes to have a single party government, they needed something that would rally Turkish voters around them and suggest that Erdogan could provide stability for the country. That something took the form of the Syrian conflict.

One of the strongest rebel forces in the fight against ISIS has been the Democratic Union Party (PYD) a Kurdish group with ties to the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), a banned group in Turkey that has made separatist claims on portions of Turkish territory and that is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and Europe.

PYD had been making gains along the northern Syrian border near Turkey in villages that had a majority Turkoman population, an ethnic group with a language closely related to Turkish.

These gains raised fears of a Kurdish separatist war in Turkey. The logic ran: If the Kurds were able to take the Turkoman villages, they could use them to support incursions into Turkey and support PKK’s efforts to separate from the rest of Turkey.

For this reason, Erdogan’s government, which had previously sought to reconcile with the country’s Kurds, began supporting the Turkomans against the Kurdish combatants and to crack down on Kurdish groups within Turkey itself.

The Clash

With political stakes this high in Turkey, Russia’s military adventures in northern Syria raised tensions between the two countries.  The attacks on the Turkoman village of Latakia began on November 16 as Assad’s ground forces expanded their operations with Russia’s air support. At that time Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu came out against the attacks, saying, “Bayirbucak Turkmens have been living in that region for many centuries. We condemn the attacks. No one can legitimize the attacks against the Arab and Turkmen populations in the region.”  The Russian Ambassador had also been summoned over the attacks.

Moreover, this conflict simply added to strain derived from previous Russian planes straying into Turkish airspace.  In October NATO had warned Russia about incursions into Turkish Airspace, noting that they created a dangerous situation.

The downing of the SU-24 shows that NATOs warnings were correct.

All Action

A meme has made its rounds on Facebook in which Obama and Putin are talking on the phone about the downing of the Russian plane, and Obama asks why, since Erdogan had warned Russia several times not to violate Turkish airspace, had Putin done it. Putin answers, “I thought he’s like you and the EU, all talk and no action.”

We’ve seen in this article it wasn’t that Erdogan was simply not all talk, but rather the political situation led to Turkey’s actions. The internal political environment in Russia and Turkey make the current situation extremely volatile.

The Russian government’s need to assert itself and show itself as more than merely a shadow of the Soviet Union leads to the type of brinksmanship that put the SU-24 in Turkish airspace. And Erdogan’s need to show himself a force for Turkish stability will make him more apt to act and less apt to talk.

One positive sign may be Turkey’s invoking article 4 of the 1949 Atlantic treaty, which states, “The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of the members, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” Turkey’s actions suggest that they are seeking to signals to Russia that it needs to be careful what steps it takes and demonstrates Turkey’s attempts not to inflame the situation.

Any further steps by Russia could lead to the invoking of article 5, which would widen the conflict and have repercussions around the world.

The U.S. and other NATO partners need to maintain a clear statement of allegiance with Turkey, but they also need to seek to decrease the tension between the countries. At the same time, observers and actors alike should make certain they look beyond simply the conflict between the countries and understand the internal politics of Russia and Turkey that have led to the current situation.

The precariousness of the leaders’ situations and unchecked power plays a role in the actions of the Russia and Turkey. Although political openness would not ensure that such tensions would never arise, it could diminish the chances that such brinkmanship will occur.

At the same time, the countries inside and outside the region should seek solutions to the conflict in Syria since the contagion effect seems to spread rapidly and broadly, as the downing of the SU-24 seems to show.

A Perfect Storm: Eurasia Feels the Effects of Mounting Crises

On August 24 the Russian ruble slipped to a seven-month low of 71.04 to the dollar, part of a perfect storm that has hit the country—sanctions over actions in Ukraine,  and the decline of crude oil prices to roughly 40 dollars per barrel. Russia’s over-reliance on oil exports for hard currency and the fact that 84 percent of the country’s oil exports were to Europe make its economy particularly susceptible to this storm.

Cutting Off Your Nose…

Such a hit to the economy can potentially raise the risk of civic unrest. Yes, Putin’s popularity is still high at the moment, but the question is whether that popularity will continue over a long period of economic malaise. Despite the fact that U.S. and European sanctions were narrowly focused on elites close to Putin, in an action that resembled the proverbial “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” in 2014 Russia retaliated with its own sanctions on imports of European and American goods, particularly food stuffs. Prior to these retaliatory sanctions, Russia had imported 43 billion dollars-worth of food products from Europe and the U.S.  

The sanctions decreased such imports in 2014, but bans had not completely blocked the path for the European and American goods. Many continued to pass through Belarus and other Former Soviet states into the market. Recently, as a show of commitment to upholding the sanctions, the Russian government burned contraband goods in accordance with presidential decree, sparking anger inside and outside the country.

The biggest threat to Putin’s power, however, may not be from civil unrest, but rather from among the elite itself. Putin’s own rise to power may provide some insight here. The 1998 Russian financial crisis had hit the country’s economy hard, causing it to contract 5.3%, the collapse of the ruble and the country’s default on treasury bills. Boris Yeltsin’s inability to manage the crisis, and his general weakness led some in the elite to recognize the need to replace him. Putin, who had been promoted from Yeltsin’s head of Security Council to prime minister in August 1999, was appointed president until official elections could be held.

Russia could see a similar situation occur with Putin if economic hardships continue for an extended period of time.

We All Fall Down

Russia is not the only former Soviet state being hit by the current crisis, and Putin’s certainly isn’t the only authoritarian government put at risk by it. Regardless of the independence gained after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Eurasian states are still highly connected and dependent on Russia for exporting raw materials and as an outlet for excess labor. The labor stop-gap is very important for many of the countries whose own economies—due to inefficiencies in the systems—are not able manage their unemployment rate.

In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan remittances make up 32 and 42 percent of GDP respectively. And the decline in the Russian economy—particularly the labor market—puts extreme pressure on these countries as their citizens are returning home without jobs. One article notes that the drop in remittances to Central Asia could be estimated at somewhere around 15 percent.

 We may be seeing the effects of the downturn manifest in the sphere of politics. Armenia, being one of the countries that are more vulnerable to risk, due to its state of war with Azerbaijan, strained relationship with Turkey and its relative lack of natural resources, has already seen civic unrest in the country over the government’s decision to raise energy prices.

It’s the Exchange Rate, Stupid

Resource rich countries like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have fared slightly better, but are beginning to see the limits of what their oil wealth can do. Unable to continue to support its currency’s managed float, Kazakhstan freely floated the tenge on August 20, which resulted in a 26.2 percent depreciation against the dollar to 255.26.

Azerbaijan, though not resorting to freely floating its currency, determined that it was unable to maintain the manat’s previous exchange rate and devalued the currency in February. Pressure in the society has grown since then with concerns over rising prices. And this concern was significantly increased with the fall of the Kazakhstan tenge, which prompted some Azerbaijanis to exchange their manats for dollars in expectation of a similar fate to the country’s currency. The situation also prompted Azerbaijan’s Trend news agency to question whether the depreciation of the tenge would affect Azerbaijan’s economy, and others to speculate about how long the Azerbaijan government would be able to maintain even the current exchange rate.

Each of these suggests a rising uncertainty in the region about the future of the countries’ economies and potentially the political status quo.

Better Late Than Never?

Perhaps it’s a little too late to repeat the international community’s mantra of “diversify, diversify, diversify.” Even though Russia claimed that sanctions enabled the country to focus on developing its internal production, it will take time for the governments of the region to make any significant changes, particularly since endemic corruption and an appearance of political, economic and legislative instability serve to deter foreign investors and discourage local small and medium business.

Recent crackdowns on political opposition further suggest an unstable environment

As these countries, lose foreign investment and their ability to export natural resources for high prices, they find themselves at greater risk. The long-term forecast for low oil prices could produce a number of negative effects over the coming years—economic and political instability being some of the most significant.

There might be a chance to start anew with the expansion of other sectors of the countries’ economies. After all, the lower exchange rates make goods more affordable on the international market and suggest less risk of suffering Dutch disease. However, this won’t be a quick fix.

Economies that were highly centered on oil and gas revenues (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Russia) cannot quickly redevelop Soviet industries that have languished for years. And reinvigorating these old industries or developing new ones will take significant investment—investment that is currently not coming from external sources and might not find sufficient cash infusion from governmental “rainy day funds.”  

The countries in the region without significant petroleum resources are not in much better situations, since many of them relied upon remittances from resource rich countries.

Most likely, what we will see is a rough few years with increased conflicts between the populace and the government—even if only on the small scale—and infighting among elites, who seek to gain access to a shrinking pool of government resources.

There is still hope, however, that the Former Soviet States will use this chance to take a hard look at the systems currently in place, and despite the fact that changes may have negative repercussions on the regimes in power, will make the hard choices that will ensure sustainability in the long-term.

Risk, Fragility and Post-Soviet Fifth Columns

On April 22, Intiqam Aliyev, Azerbaijani human rights defender, was sentenced to seven and a half years for tax evasion, abuse of authority, illegal entrepreneurship and appropriation. On May 6, another well known-activist, Faraj Karimov, was given a six-year sentence on drug-related charges. Critics have claimed the sentences were politically motivated, particularly since they come at the time of a general crackdown on opponents of the Azerbaijani government.

Human rights groups, international institutions and governments have warned that such a crackdown would bolster radicalism, or that the actions could result in protests and instability. In her testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in February 2015, Audrey Altstadt, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted, “Critics oppose the regime, not the state. But the regime identifies itself with the state and claims that a threat to its own power is a threat to statehood. Under these conditions, endemic corruption, lack of democratic governance, and repression of critical voices undermine the stability of society and therefore put the country at risk.” She later states that the clamp-down on civil society is a “risky and counter-productive strategy for the regime itself.”

Altstadt makes a strong case, but to understand why the Azerbaijani government made these decisions, we need to look at Altstadt’s statement in two parts: 1) “critics oppose the regime, not the state” and 2) the Azerbaijan government’s decisions to crackdown on civil society are “risky and counter-productive.”

State and Regime

Despite Altstadt’s distinction between opposition to the regime and opposition to the state, the situation might not be so clear-cut in Azerbaijan. The president and the parliament are elected, but since the early ‘90s the elections have never passed international standards for being free and fair. Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Index currently lists the country as “Not Free,” receiving low scores on both political rights and civil liberties.

At the center of the system lies a combination of clan and patronage politics, which results in a highly centralized and personalized system and in effect closes the distance between the regime and the state.

This type of system makes it difficult to distinguish where the government ends and the state begins.

Civil Society as a Threat to the State

The Azerbaijan government has woven a narrative similar to that of Russia that the United States is drawing on democracy development programs to create a fifth column in the country. The narrative has the underlying logic that given the state and government are inseparable and opposition groups and parties are “radical” and “anti-Azerbaijani,” any change of regime—democratic or otherwise—would undermine the state. Thus liberal groups and organizations, particularly those receiving funding from the U.S. for democracy development programs have been attacked for their role in undermining the sovereignty of the state.

To fully grasp the narrative, we need to look at its history, which is intimately connected to the threat deriving from the color revolutions in Eurasia and the events of the Arab Spring. 
With the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. and European funding for democracy development programs began to be provided to civil society organizations, founded on the theory that transition to market economics required a concomitant transition to democratic governance. From the beginning, many post-Soviet authoritarian governments had an uneasy relationship with the programs, even going so far as creating GONGOs (Government Organized Non-Governmental Organizations) in order to control the sphere of civil society and maintain low levels of opposition. As many of the fledgling governments became more established, they gave less room for civil society and democracy development programs. Kyrgyzstan’s Askar Akayev is a good example. The Kyrgyzstan government began its movement away from democracy in 1996, when the new constitution codified a strong president and weak parliament. And by 1999 Kyrgyzstan was designated by Freedom House as “Not Free.”

In 2002 and 2003, Azerbaijan was still designated as “Partly Free.” However, in December 2003, the country’s president Heydar Aliyev died. The election of his son, Ilham Aliyev, was followed by violent protests, giving evidence of discontent and a potential weakness in the regime. These events and the Rose and Orange revolutions (in Georgia and Ukraine respectively) demonstrated the susceptibility of the post-Soviet authoritarian regimes to instability, leading the Azerbaijan government to tighten its grip on power. The 2006 Tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan hammered home this concern about unrest.

The situation was not helped when Azerbaijan’s leadership witnessed the Arab Spring in the Middle East in 2011, the 2012 post-election protests in Russia, the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine (and the subsequent descent into conflict over Crimea and Donbas) and the 2013 controversy over Ilham Aliyev’s election to a third term. 

The crisis in Ukraine and the increasingly aggressive activities of Russia (with the rationale of resistance to the encroachment of the U.S. and Europe) resulted in the leadership of a number of post-Soviet countries growing more concerned about being caught in the middle of a geopolitical struggle that seemed to be occurring in the civil society of post-Soviet space. 

In the lead up to the 2013 presidential elections, small protests began to pop up in Ismayilli, Quba and Nardaran causing unease in the Azerbaijani government.

By 2014, the head of the Azerbaijan President’s Cabinet accused the U.S. government of “forming a radical group of protesters.” Just recently, the Azerbaijan newspaper, a publication of the Azerbaijani parliament, published a piece claiming that the United States had created a fifth column in the country.

Crackdowns and Increased Risk
Is Azerbaijan’s government putting itself at risk because of its decision to crack down on groups critical of the regime?
In his book Principles of International Politics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita points out that on average democratic leaders stay in office for less than four years, while their authoritarian counterparts for roughly nine, suggesting a general increased longevity of authoritarian rulers.

Jack Goldstone et al. have pointed out that “…the risk of instability is lowest in full autocracies and full democracies, other things being equal. By contrast, hybrid regimes—partial autocracies and partial democracies—are substantially more vulnerable to crisis than their more ‘coherent’ counterparts.”

In 2003, Azerbaijan’s Partly Free designation set it squarely among the hybrid regimes, i.e. at higher risk. The options, then, were to move either toward democracy or authoritarianism. Given both Bueno de Mesquita’s point about longevity of leaders in the two systems and the need for stability, the more rational choice in the short-term was to tighten the government’s grasp.

Fragility
But the decision for the short term does not consider the fact that other risks can arise from strengthening the authoritarian elements of government. A highly centralized and personalized authoritarianism can produce fragility in the system in the longer-term. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book Antifragile notes that nonlinear systems—in which most of the volatility can be attributed to one or a small number of events—are highly fragile.



Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton later explained, “The first marker of a fragile state is a concentrated decision-making system. On its face, centralization seems to make governments more efficient and thus more stable. But that stability is an illusion.”

Since the centralized system is able to hold volatility in check for such a long time, it does not have the benefit of self-correction that comes with handling small shocks often—as would be done in a more open system. Without that self-correction, the fragility in the system does not enable the state to handle slightly larger shocks, and the harm from these shocks may be increased exponentially—resulting in a non-linear system. Taleb and Treverton note that Lebanon, because it has constant small incidences of unrest, is better prepared to handle larger protests without sinking into chaos as Syria has.

Similarly, Azerbaijan’s ability to stave off opposition through heavy-handed policies may leave the country vulnerable to slightly larger unrest down the road.

The government may be able to hold volatility in check for now, and may decrease short-term uncertainty by removing opponents from the political field, but with the decline in oil prices, the fall in the value of the manat and the potential for shocks throughout the Azerbaijan economy (which has a low level of diversification)—some coming from Russia’s economic woes—the Azerbaijani government may need to keep Taleb’s and Altstadt’s thoughts in mind, even if the best bet in the short-term seems to be strengthening authoritarian elements of the government.

At the same time, recommendations from international Institutions need to keep in mind the interpretation, logic and the political calculus of the Azerbaijan government. To claim the separation between regime and state is to assume the depersonalization of the state, which is not necessarily the case. With the present form of government in place, the logic of “attacks on the regime are attacks on the state” hold. However, it is specifically this personalized authoritarian state that creates the interconnection, and thus the subsequent risk—not some external power or fifth column.