National Channel's News Center: experts discuss Turkey's policy for Ukraine and the mistakes in Crimea

"The Ukraine issue clearly embroils Turkey and Russia", Dr. Sencer Imer said, adding that Turkey's hostility to Russia is 180 degrees contrary to Turkey's interests, as being involved into that operation could cause problems with the South stream pipeline, cut off the nuclear power plant in Akkuyu, and S-400s supply, weaken economic relations there and trade. "From the economic perspective we see a difficult situation in Turkey, because it has structural problems" - he highlighted.

Ihsan Sefa stated: "The United States and NATO are supporting Ukraine against Russia, so we need to move to one-way politics", reminding that Turkey has a number of agreements with Ukraine including defense cooperation ones. "We need Ukrainian technologies that were developed back in the Soviet period, for instance for our national combat aircraft. So it's not going to be very nice for us to turn against Ukraine, but we're not going to try to get Ukraine into NATO. Other countries won't want to take it anyway. At the same time, we must not lose Russia's trust by bringing this forward. We go and cooperate with Russia in Syria, then we go back to the Black Sea with Russia's enemy. These are the wrong policies".

Prof. Dr. Semih Koray, deputy leader of the Homeland Party, stated that the Black Sea would become a NATO lake if Ukraine and Georgia joined NATO: "It is not an issue between the United States and Russia, but rather an issue between the United States and the whole world. If Ukraine and Georgia are included in NATO, this will not only mean the encirclement of Russia from the south, but also the encirclement of Turkey from the north. This would affect stability, peace, development opportunities of all countries in the region".

Deniz Berktay expressed concerns about increasing NATO presence in the region. "When we look at Turkey's foreign policy, when we look at the threats to Turkey, the real threat comes from the West. NATO's weight here has increased too much, which of course is undesirable for Turkey's interests".

Concluding the discussion, Hasan Cengiz noted the importance of the Black Sea, underlining that since Ataturk it has been "the sea of peace". Talking about Crimea and related political tensions, he said: "Crimea needs some time. In 50-100 years, these issues will not be on the agenda. The world is shifting to Eurasia. You have to be careful at a time like this".

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