Ukraine has begun recasting Turkey as a strategic replacement for a fraying U.S. partnership, wagering that NATO's second-largest military and a Turkish defense industry already embedded in Kyiv can absorb the slack left by President Donald Trump.
President Volodymyr Zelensky's meeting with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which the Ukrainian leader called "one of the most positive in all these years," produced fresh security, gas and energy agreements, Politico reported in a dispatch analyzed by "Hvylya". The warmup lands as Trump's White House has cooled on Kyiv and U.S.-led peace talks with Moscow have stalled.
"Turkey is the only NATO country that can project power in the region, not provoking any global conflict," said Igor Semyvolos, director of the Kyiv-based Association of Middle East Studies. Turkish defense giant Baykar is already building a drone factory in Ukraine, cementing an industrial bond that does not depend on Washington's mood swings.
Ankara's own calculations are shifting. Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Russia's war has pushed Turkey to worry that Moscow could dominate much of the Black Sea. "Now, Turkey can count on having a large bloc that can counter the Russian presence around the sea," he said. Despite continued energy and tourism ties with Moscow, Cagaptay added, it would be wrong to describe Turkey as pro-Russian.
The relationship still has sharp edges. Russia remains Turkey's top energy supplier and a leading source of tourists blocked from Europe. Ankara sells weapons to Kyiv but provides almost no military or humanitarian aid, and Erdogan has offered Istanbul as the venue for revived peace talks with Russia - a posture that keeps a foot in both camps.
For Zelensky, the Erdogan deal is only one layer of a wider regional outreach that retired U.S. general Stanley McChrystal has described as a direct consequence of Trump's "America First" unwinding of post-war alliances. Kyiv has struck defense agreements with Gulf countries, offering Ukrainian expertise against Iranian drone attacks, and Zelensky flew to Damascus on a Turkish state plane for trilateral talks with Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on energy, defense and logistics. In parallel, Zelensky has pushed back on recent U.S. accusations and laid out the details of the security talks that underpin the new alignment.