On 18 April 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated: “The Ukraine war has once again shown how accurate our quest for the establishment of a fair world order is. The importance of our reform efforts in the United Nations Security Council, which we have symbolized by saying the world is bigger than five, has been understood.”
Speaking on Turkish television on 20 April, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu – alluding to the 2019 Rand Corporation reports [1] – said : “There are NATO countries that want the war to continue. They are not particularly interested in the situation in Ukraine.”
Turkey, whose economy is very dependent on Russian imports, refuses to apply the anti-Russian sanctions adopted by other NATO members.
[1] Overextending and Unbalancing Russia, James Dobbins, Raphael S. Cohen, Nathan Chandler, Bryan Frederick, Edward Geist, Paul DeLuca, Forrest E. Morgan, Howard J. Shatz, Brent Williams, Rand Corporation, April 2019. The details of the plan are expounded in Extending Russia : Competing from Advantageous Ground, Raphael S. Cohen, Nathan Chandler, Bryan Frederick, Edward Geist, Paul DeLuca, Forrest E. Morgan, Howard J. Shatz & Brent Williams, Rand Corporation, May 25, 2019. These two reports were presented to the US House of Representatives on September 5, 2019.