Unpacking Russian Info Ops in Türkiye: Distrust, Disinformation and Disorientation (Part III. Agents of Russian Influence)

In many cases, it is not the Kremlin-owned or marginal Turkish media that retranslate Russian propaganda. Mainstream Turkish newspapers often test the limits of professional and ethical standards of journalism by cherry-picking offensive and clearly biased content, thus framing and manipulating public opinion.

In the previous parts, we have looked at the domestic context and vulnerabilities of Türkiye’s information space to Russian info ops. In this part we’ll focus on Russian agents of influence who exploit these vulnerabilities to disseminate the Kremlin’s narratives and those “experts” who amplify Russian voices in Turkish media.

The part of the problem is that Russia is pushing its anti-Western, pro-Russian and Eurasianist narratives similarly in pro-governmental and oppositional media outlets, both rightwing and leftwing. While the ideology of Turkish Eurasianism in its different manifestations deserve a separate detailed analysis, its main idea was aptly put by one of the concept’s masterminds Mehmet Perinçek: “A number of intellectual and political actors together with sections of the military have started to articulate Eurasianism (Avrasyacılık) as a new geopolitical discourse for Türkiye and as an alternative to Türkiye’s pro-Western foreign policy orientation”. 

The threat posed by the “neo-Eurasianism” stems from the massive support of Russia, who uses this concept to consolidate its grip over Turkish elites as well as to win hearts and minds of people. Experts say that, unlike in previous years, when it was mainly a theoretical construct of a marginal group on the sidelines of Turkish politics, gradually neo-Eurasianists transformed “from incarcerated villains to coalition partners in government and the bureaucracy” capitalizing on the power struggle inside Türkiye as well as Moscow’s generous financial support and information resources. As put by the former deputy chairman and spokesman of the foreign affairs committee in the Turkish Parliament Suat Kınıklıoğlu, this has become possible because “Nationalist-Islamism and Eurasianism overlap as they both despise Western dominance in the international order, feel threatened by the liberal cultural-civilizational siege of the West and have a common counter-hegemonic view of the world”. 

In fact, Aleksandr Dugin, Russian ideologist of Eurasianism, also wrote about this in his book “Moscow-Ankara Axis”, which was later translated into Turkish: “It is important that anti-Americanism unites three morally different, sometimes antagonistic forces in Turkish society: leftists, nationalists, and representatives of religious circles. Such a wide range shows that Eurasianism in Türkiye has great prospects, far beyond the level of any single political force or party.” In his later article, “Türkiye’s Eurasian Strategy,” he elaborated on the scope of potential partners: “Eurasianism [in Türkiye] has found interest among completely opposite forces – right-wing nationalists, centrists, religious circles, a certain segment of the military leadership, intellectual foundations such as the Yasawi Foundation,  [Fethullah Gülen’s] “Dialogue Eurasia Platform”, economic structures such as the “Eurasian Forum”, Association of Russian-Turkish Friendship RUTAM, the non-conformist magazine “Yarın”, etc.”. 

While the Eurasianist ideology itself and its high political cost for Türkiye’s transatlantic relationship have been discussed in our previous publications, the popularity of the neo-Eurasianist agenda among military and political circles, experts and academic community helped channel these ideas to a wider audience by significantly expanding the pool of pro-Russian commentators in Turkish conventional and social media.

This became even more obvious during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Turkish political analyst Ragip Soylu observed that on most of the Turkish TV shows, “secular Turkish-nationalist retired generals and military officers regularly attack[ed] the West” while “criticism of Russia and China [was] almost non-existent”. In his overview of the Turkish media coverage of the “Russia-Ukraine War: Talk Show Generals Sway Public Against NATO”, he shared multiple cases of “mainstream media featuring retired generals and commentators who blamed the war on Washington and NATO’s eastward expansion” and saluted the Russian “military operation” in Ukraine as “a step to end the imperialist Atlanticist age”.

Retired army officers and admirals have appeared so frequently in Turkish media after the start of the Russian war in Ukraine that the phenomenon of “Talk show generals” and “Talk show nationalists” has drawn attention of many analysts as a well-planned coordinated effort to incite anti-NATO, anti-US and anti-Ukrainian sentiments in Türkiye. Not only have they tried to legitimize Russian invasion of Ukraine as a justified move but also used every opportunity to highlight the threat of the West’s “campaign to destroy Türkiye or, at the very least, bring it to heel”. 

On top of that, government control over media (as well as oftentimes self-imposed censorship) makes the information ecosystem more susceptible to manipulation by limiting the scope of alternative voices. As a result, those experts who are usually invited to the mainstream media are often the ones from the “expert pools”, which are chosen based on their ideological views and loyalty, not on their subject matter expertise or merit. Thus, depending on the context, far-right nationalists or leftist sympathizers of Russia can equally become the “stars of the show” voicing pretty much the same messages from the Russian playbook.  

For example, a former lieutenant general of the Turkish Air Force, who is now head of the Retired Officers Association, has established himself as a military expert and regular contributor to the news shows talking about “US attempts to turn Ukraine into another Syria” and “NATO’s struggle to seize the North Pole from Russia”. Another officer, rear admiral Cem Gürdeniz, has got fame as the navy’s chief strategist and a mastermind of the “Mavi Vatan” naval doctrine. Though vocally opposed to AKP’s conservative Islamic agenda, he has made a name as a “proponent of the government’s plans to expand and modernize the Turkish fleet” in a bid to secure Türkiye’s emergence as an assertive naval regional power, oftentimes at the expense of Türkiye’s relations with NATO allies. In recent years, Gürdeniz has been active on Turkish TV and in the press, especially as a frequent contributor to the Patriotic Party’s newspaper, “Aydınlık”. There, he wrote extensively on the necessity to build a “Eurasianist alliance” and “inevitability of the Turkish-Russian, Turkish-Chinese and Turkish-Iranian rapprochement”. 

The Patriotic (“Vatan”) party is an interesting case in itself. Being a marginal political party with an anti-Western, Eurasianist agenda, it usually gets less than 1% of public votes in nation-wide elections but is omnipresent in print, television and social media. The twitter accounts of Aydınlık newspaper (303 thousand subscribers) and Ulusal Kanal (522 thousand) retranslate Russian narratives in full. In fact, the party itself is serving as a “range extender” of the Russian propaganda, fake news and info ops in Türkiye. This is also the only political force in the country that has called on the government to recognize Crimea as a Russian territory. It has also suggested a “Black Sea – Mediterranean Plan of Peace and Friendship”, according to which “Abkhazia Republic and self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus had to be recognized as independent states”, Crimea – as a “Russian territory”, and “US and NATO bases in the region had to be shut down”. 

The same Turkish Eurasianist mouthpieces played a key role in bringing Daria Dugina’s assassination to the top of Türkiye’s agenda, with many nationalist media joining them afterwards. “CIA games! US leaked Ukraine again: behind Daria Dugina’s assassination stands Ukraine” said one of the right-wing media’s headlines. 

Relations between the Russian and Turkish Eurasianists are institutionalized via a series of joint initiatives, and are based on close personal ties. Patriotic Party’s leader, Doğu Perinçek, has a long record of political partnership with Alexander Dugin, as both played a key role in Turkish-Russian rapprochement after the jet crisis. His son, Mehmet Perinçek, who is now carrying on his father’s work, has boasted a childhood friendship with Daria Dugina in numerous interviews and blogs. 

Many of the Turkish experts who actively commented on the car incident with the Russian propagandist’s daughter are frequent contributors for the United World International (UWI) – a bilingual English-Turkish web-site, where she had worked as an editor-in-chief. In March 2022, the US Treasury sanctioned this site as a Russian intelligence-directed disinformation outlet, closely related to the media influence organization “Lakhta”, owned by Yevgeniy Prigozhin. The press release said it was serving Russia’s “efforts to promulgate disinformation and influence perceptions”. The main narratives promoted by the Patriotic Party and the UWI platform in Türkiye include a need for the new world order and the idea that Ankara should support Russia in its war on Ukraine, because “if Russia falls, Türkiye will be the next one to be partitioned by NATO”.

The left-wing media, such as OdaTV (1,7 million followers on Twitter), can equally serve as a mouthpiece of Russian propaganda sharing disinformation and fake stories, like the one about “Nazi General of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Zaluzhniy with a swastika bracelet”. Co-founder of the OdaTV news website Soner Yalçın, who is perceived as influencer for a wide audience (1.8 million followers on Twitter), in March 2022 criticized Turkish media for being too pro-Ukrainian: "Our media have raised the President of Ukraine Zelensky to the level of a "hero"! This is someone who trusted the US and took decisions that dragged his country into a war... How easy is it to get the title of "valiant soldier" for someone who caused the bombing and mass destruction of his country and the death of his people?" Later, he wrote extensively about the role of the "American empire" in the "proxy war in Ukraine", which “used Ukrainians” for its own purposes "just like the Kurds and Fethullah Gülen's organization", thus justifying Russian aggression. His posts caused outrage of many readers and received responses from other journalists. 

Finally, both “Sputnik Türkiye” and “Radio Sputnik” (RS) have not been banned and are still active in Türkiye (1 million subscribers on Twitter), though their popularity has decreased in recent months. One of its major contributors Ceyda Karan (400 thousand subscribers on Twitter), had started her career in a number of small nationalist newspapers, then moved to the main oppositional mouthpiece “Cumhuriyet “ (Kemalist, left), and ended up in “Sputnik Türkiye” sharing stories about “Ukrainian Nazis drinking blood of Russian babies”. 

Another example of a journalist’s journey from respected media outlets like “Sabah” and “Hürriyet” to “Aydınlık” and later Tele1 TV  is Merdan Yanardağ (640.8 thousand followers on Twitter). On February 24, 2022 he was explaining on TV that “Ukraine is a country that has never existed in history” and ever since has polluted Turkish media space with stories of “Ukrainian Nazis openly wearing their Nazi symbols” and “a gang of bandits running the country from Kiev”, “who forbid people to speak any language other than Ukrainian” and “discriminate against the Crimean Tatars”. The Tele1 TV, where Merdan Yanardağ is a founding editor-in-chief and a co-host in “18 minutes” program, has been present on all major satellite TV platforms since 2017, has 1,2 million followers on Twitter and 621 thousand subscribers on YouTube. 

In November 2022, Yanardağ had a live broadcast from Moscow, which is a perfect example of the Kremlin’s playbook propaganda: praising great Russian culture, admiring Pushkin and Tchaikovsky monuments, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Russian theatre and statehood traditions, peppered with extreme anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western propaganda. During the same visit he allegedly held meetings in the Russian MFA and met with Georgiy Muradov, a so-called “deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Crimea - Permanent Representative of the Republic of Crimea to the President of the Russian Federation”. At the same time, Okay Deprem who is labeled “Tele1 TV’s Ukrainian correspondent”, regularly reports from the occupied territories of Ukraine covering the so-called “Russian special military operation” in the so-called “Donetsk People Republic”. 

In many cases though, it is not the Kremlin-owned or marginal Turkish media that retranslate Russian propaganda. Mainstream Turkish newspapers often test the limits of professional and ethical standards of journalism by cherry-picking offensive and clearly biased content, thus framing and manipulating public opinion. The most recent examples include the November publication of the leading “Hürriyet” newspaper called “The US is shaken by these words... Zelensky will be furious”. “Zelenskyy statements, made by the Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, fell on the country’s agenda like a bomb” – claimed one the Turkish leading media. “Carlson said Zelensky was “a corrupt dictator demanding money from US taxpayers” and accused him of trying to drag the US into the Third World War. We are spending twice as much aid in Ukraine as we used to spend each year in Afghanistan. Who is this guy? A corrupt Ukrainian dictator. Where does he get this audacity?” reiterates “Hürriyet” the questions of the Fox News anchor. And provides the Turkish audience with answers given by the former US Special Operations pilot: “Although Zelenskyy’s political career had been financed by billionaire Igor Kolomoisky, his property was later confiscated. Now Zelenskyy has a bigger, a richer, a more important, and more powerful philanthropist – the Biden administration”. “Hürriyet” journalists end their “article” by quoting the Russian RT News who wrote that “Washington has provided nearly $70 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine this year”, and cite the Wall Street Journal, voicing concerns of the US congressional and government officials about the scope of aid given to Ukraine and the “delays it caused in arms shipments to Taiwan”. This is only one, though telling example, of how Russian info ops shape Turkish public opinion either with direct interventions in Türkiye’s media space via its agents of influence or due to the unfortunate lack of knowledge and expertise among local experts. 

With the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections next year, Turkish information space is likely to become even more sensitive to Russian info ops as the society is growing more polarized and, thus, more vulnerable to external influences. One of the recent attempts to drag Ukraine into Turkish domestic politics is Turkish writer Mustafa Güldağ’s comparison between the leading oppositional name, Istanbul Mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. On December 15, after the court decision in Imamoglu’s case, he wrote a long thread on Twitter explaining how the West “is cloning” the “new type of state leaders”: “With the Ukrainian turmoil, globalist powers have used Zelenskyy to introduce a new type of leader, that of a showman and actor. This is the type of a leader that globalist powers want to see in other countries. This type was carefully produced in the movie setting, in the agency. A carefully prepared project from the very beginning to the end. This type of leader is the most suitable leader type for the big reset. Remember. These types are produced and promoted by agencies and movie companies. A film, music and entertainment company “Kvartal 95 Studio” made Zelenskyy famous. Zelenskyy becomes famous for a TV series. In Türkiye, such an entertainer typology has already been created. Macron was the first example of this typology. Then it was cloned to other countries as well. The connections of the agencies and companies that make these types shine should be well researched”. In his Twitter account with more than 129 thousand followers Mustafa Güldağı advertises tens of books “shedding light” on the West’s conspiracies and “deep state” theories.

Turkish experts also warn about the high probability of Russia’s meddling in the future Turkish elections with its armies of bots and trolls.  For example, just recently, millions of social media users shared a video of the Russian president Putin talking at the Russian Energy Week 2022 about his “gas hub” idea and Türkiye’s role in it. The video had Turkish subtitles stating that “Russia will only supply natural gas to Türkiye and that Türkiye will be the only addressee on that for the Western countries” (which Putin never said in reality). This post was initially shared by a TikTok user named “kisasakisastr”, where it got 466 thousand likes, and quickly became viral on TikTok, Twitter and other social media platforms. 

It was also shared by a former Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek, who has 4 million 300 thousand followers on Twitter, and had played his role in Turkish-Russian rapprochement after hosting Russian Eurasianist Aleksandr Dugin in the Ankara Municipality on the eve of the failed coup attempt in July 2016. During that “historical” visit Dugin was accompanied by Hasan Cengiz, a president of the “Eurasian Union of Local Governments” (Avrasya Yerel Yönetimler Birliği), who is known for promoting ideas of “Russkiy mir” and “Eurasian world” in Türkiye, has close connections to the Dugin family and uses channels of citizen diplomacy to promote Eurasianist agenda, deny Ukraine’s independence and discredit the West. 

This list of the Eurasianist proponents and Russian agents of influence is not exhaustive.  

Of course, these examples are not to say there are no trustworthy media outlets in Türkiye, which are carefully checking the information and preserving high professional standards. This is, however, to say that there are still those, which threaten Türkiye’s national security by exposing the country to Russian info ops and showering their readers with tons of fake news.  

It is not up to us, in Ukraine, to judge Turkish domestic politics or Turkish media, even if they are voicing Russian, or any other, propaganda. But it is up to us, Ukrainian experts, journalists and bloggers, to make sure that even amidst it, Ukrainian voices are still heard in Türkiye.