OPED By Shay Gal
When Ersin Tatar, the former “president” of northern Cyprus under Turkish occupation, appeared in the family photo of the Turkic States last October and signed the Gabala Declaration, Moscow took notice.
What it failed to grasp is that the same stage used to rehearse legitimacy for an occupied territory is also rehearsing something far larger: a quiet redrawing of identity across Russia’s Muslim regions.
Turkish strategists speak of a Turkic arc from Anatolia to Siberia. In 2022, one narrative listed ten Russian regions, including Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Chuvashia, as “Turkic republics” within the Russian Federation, folded into a “Contiguous Turkestan Project”.
In this frame, Russia is not merely a neighbour but a state sitting atop a Turkic population Ankara treats as kin and long-term leverage.
Ankara does not redraw borders; it reshapes identity.
The 2021 Shusha Declaration with Azerbaijan entrenched the formula “two states, one nation”, offering a template Turkey now applies implicitly inside Russia: not another northern Cyprus, but “Azerbaijans without sovereignty”, republics that remain within the federation yet drift culturally towards Ankara.
Kazan is Russia’s Muslim centre.
The “Russia-Islamic World: KazanForum” is the premier federal-status platform linking Russia with OIC states, drawing nearly 8,500 guests from 96 countries and 82 Russian regions, with hundreds of events and dozens of agreements, including the Russia Halal Expo and business sessions on investment and the halal industry.
KazanForum and KazanSummit bring the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Gulf, and Turkish delegations to sign halal and economic agreements.
Rais Rustam Minnikhanov chairs the “Russia-Islamic World” group and meets President Erdogan; the two discuss trade and joint projects. Turkish influence flows through the Yunus Emre Institute and university partnerships:
Kazan Federal University hosts students from Turkey and holds agreements with Turkish institutions. Kazan is a Turkic capital, where Russian sovereignty meets Turkish identity.
Ankara’s path in the North Caucasus runs through commerce, travel, and faith. Turkey has become a partner for Dagestan, building trade and construction links with a region Russian analysts call “restive”.
Direct flights from Makhachkala to Istanbul move workers, students, and religious seekers. In Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov uses his rapport with Erdogan to act as an intermediary; in 2022, he referenced a meeting with Turkey’s foreign minister and MIT chief Hakan Fidan during a Putin-Erdogan summit in Sochi. These contacts deepen familiarity among Muslim elites with regional influence.
The religious vector is driven by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a geopolitical arm. Its budget has grown under Erdogan, surpassing 3 billion dollars.
Diyanet’s mosques, imams, and attachés have become tools of Turkish policy in Muslim communities across Europe, prompting investigations into political influence and surveillance. The same institution operates in Russia.
Russian Muslim authorities openly cultivate ties with Ankara. Senior figures in the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia (DUMRF) describe their collaboration with Diyanet and its then president, Mehmet Gormez, and their use of Turkey’s religious establishment as a model for training clergy and issuing fatwas.
Diyanet’s English-language journal presents Islam as a continuous Turkic heritage interrupted by Russian rule, now reopened with Turkish support. Its essays frame Tatar and Bashkir religious life as a restored tradition, a narrative unwelcome in Moscow.
The rise and fall of Kazan, the trauma of forced Christianisation, and the nineteenth-century settlement with imperial rule become episodes in a Turkic story of a people cut off from kin. Diyanet conferences, youth camps, mosque inaugurations, and forums sustain that memory: sermons invoking “ancestors”, training programmes for Russian imams, invitations for Tatar students to attend summer language schools in Turkey under the Yunus Emre umbrella.
Moscow acts as the administrative centre; Ankara acts as the emotional one.
The Organization of Turkic States, founded as a cooperation council, is a venue where recognition can be manufactured. In November 2022, northern Cyprus, under Turkish occupation, was accepted as an Observer Member, alongside Hungary and Turkmenistan, thereby creating a precedent for legitimising contested entities within a Turkic institutional structure.
Delegations from Russia’s Turkic regions orbit this space: officials from Tatarstan and Bashkortostan appear at events attended by OTS leadership. Watching Ersin Tatar being treated as the president shows what Ankara can do for an unrecognised Turkic project.
Azerbaijan demonstrates the model Ankara promotes.
The Shusha Declaration codified military and economic integration, including joint defence planning, energy corridors, and coordinated media and education policies, under “one nation in two states”. Turkey presents this within the OTS as the template, a polity that retains sovereignty but orbits Ankara. For Turkic elites inside Russia, independence is not required to shift into the Turkic space. What matters is sustained economic and religious connectivity that provides options when regional balances change.
Qatar adds a parallel layer. While specific Russian figures remain opaque, Qatari delegations, Gulf investors, and regional envoys appear across Kazan and the North Caucasus. Qatar Charity funds Islamic centres in Europe, for example, the Le Juste Milieu mosque in Luxembourg, illustrating Doha’s investment in piety infrastructure that dovetails with broader soft-power networks.
Without proof of major official religious funding inside Russia, a division of labour emerges across Eurasia: Ankara builds Turkic identity; Doha builds piety.
Together, they shape an environment in which being Muslim in Russia comes with Turkish and Qatari reference points.
Analyses describe Russia straining under sanctions, a war economy, and the need to sustain operations. The Crocus City Hall attack exposed failures in domestic counter-terrorism and pushed Moscow to centralise further. The gap is the slow expansion of foreign cultural and religious influence in places the Kremlin assumes it controls.
Russia’s security doctrine is tuned to insurgency, not identity. Since the Beslan era, the FSB has run a system built around insurgency tactics. Under anti-terrorism, Moscow centralised authority, deployed special forces, co-opted local strongmen, and treated Islamic activism as a security problem.
Within that lens, Diyanet imams, Turkish cultural centres, Kazan business forums and youth exchanges do not register as threats. Agencies that track Salafi circles in Makhachkala will not open files on Turkish-funded institutes or scholarship programmes that shift Tatar socialisation towards Ankara.
The Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) runs external operations. In Europe, investigations have linked Diyanet and diaspora networks to intelligence activity: gathering information on political opponents and organising groups that can serve MIT. Inside Russia, MIT does not need agent networks.
Once Turkic and Muslim populations are treated as strategic depth, intelligence shifts from recruitment to mapping: clerics, rectors, businessmen, and youth leaders who orient towards Turkey; muftis who follow Diyanet rulings; governors who travel to Ankara; regional deputies who appear at the Kazan Summit. Intelligence decides who to empower in cultural and religious terrain.
The West sees this pattern in Europe, while similar structures now operate inside Russia. At the same time Moscow and Ankara are bound by a dependence neither admits: Turkey bought Russia’s S-400s inside NATO; Russia builds and fuels Turkey’s Akkuyu reactor; and the Ankara tied to Russian nuclear engineers is the one whose Bayraktars hit Russia early in the war. It is another turn in a rivalry where the two empires trade air defence, nuclear power, and energy while competing for influence from the Black Sea to the Caucasus.
In that silence, Turkey advances. It is building what neither Western nor Russian intelligence names: an identity corridor running from EU Muslim communities into Russia, through European mosques and through Kazan, Diyanet, and Yunus Emre structures in Tatarstan and Dagestan. While Moscow fought in Ukraine, Turkey stitched the Volga, Anatolia, and the Caucasus into a cognitive zone beyond Moscow’s control and Brussels’s understanding.
Russia and the West fear the same outcome: a coherent, Sunni, Turkic, mobilisable belt from the Volga to the EU, aligning with Ankara. And the taboo is not ambition; the taboo is that Russia enabled it through S-400s and Akkuyu, and the West reinforced it by celebrating Bayraktars and grain deals while ignoring identity.
Moscow holds the passports. Ankara holds the allegiance.
- Shay Gal is a strategic analyst specialising in international security, foreign policy and geopolitical crisis management. He advises senior government and defence leaders and brings deep expertise in public diplomacy and strategic communications. His work examines power dynamics, hybrid competition and the institutional and identity forces that shape decision-making.
- This is an opinion article. VIEWS PERSONAL OF THE AUTHOR
