Russia benefits from Turkey’s tiff with UN, NATO allies over Cyprus village

The UN Security Council was due to convene today to discuss developments in Pyla, an ethnically mixed village on the divided island of Cyprus, where UN peacekeepers were manhandled and injured by Turkish Cypriot security forces Friday as Turkish Cypriots worked to build an unauthorized road in the area that is under the UN’s control.

The UN’s special representative in Cyprus, Colin Stewart, is expected to brief the Security Council on the latest developments via video link before it gathers in New York amid growing worries of an escalation.

Turkish Cypriot security forces were unlikely to have acted without Turkey’s blessing, raising questions about how sincere Ankara is about easing tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean and a loudly heralded reset with its longtime rival Greece.

The move drew swift and sharp rebukes from the UN. In a joint statement, Turkey’s NATO allies the United States, Britain and France said that threats to UN personnel and property constituted “a serious crime under international law.”

Britain is especially spooked as the scuffles occurred close to one of its sovereign military bases on the island. “Instability in Cyprus is not good for stability of the bases,” said James Ker-Lindsey, a British researcher who closely follows and advises the UK government on Cypriot affairs.

Turkey is showing no signs of backing down. The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it fully supported Ersin Tatar, the hawkish prime minister of the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus that is solely recognized by Ankara, who declared construction would forge ahead on the road linking Pyla to another village, Yigitler or Arsos in Greek, along the UN-monitored “Green Zone.”

The statement read, “It is inexplicable that despite this, the UN has for years turned a blind eye to the Greek Cypriot administration’s faits accomplis in the buffer zone while preventing the Turkish Cypriots from meeting their justified humanitarian needs.”

It hasn’t helped that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist allies posted a video of their leader Devlet Bahceli captioned “Cyprus is Turkish” soon after the incident. He is seen pacing around his office in Hessian-style riding boots favored by Turkey’s founder, the soldier-turned-statesman Kemal Ataturk.

Russia is clearly hoping to exploit the affair to torpedo Ankara’s purported tilt toward the West in the wake of the June NATO summit in Vilnius, where Erdogan greenlit Sweden’s membership in the alliance subject to ratification by the Turkish Parliament. The Kremlin reportedly thwarted the issuing of a condemnatory statement by the Security Council that was drafted by the British and approved by Washington and Paris, according to Greek Cypriot media.

“Covering for Ankara at the Security Council is going to be lending a lot of weight to the idea that Russia is trying to win Turkey over and give the Greek Cypriots pause for thought as to where Russia stands now,” Ker-Lindsey told Al-Monitor.

Russia announced earlier this month that it would be offering consular services to the tens of thousands of Russians who have been flocking to the Turkish north since the invasion. It has also been dropping hints that it might start direct flights to northern Cyprus in defiance of international law.

Until Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, covering two thirds of the island, served as a money laundering haven for Russian billionaires. It drew Western ire when it signed a deal in 2015 allowing Russian navy ships to dock at its ports. The arrangement was formally scrapped in March 2022 and US access to Greek Cyprus increased. Later that year, the United States lifted an arms embargo on Cyprus that was imposed to pre-empt an intra-island arms race, drawing strong protests from Ankara.

Some speculate that Ankara’s actions are designed to jolt the Greek Cypriots into reviving long stalled peace talks to reunify the island. Cyprus has remained divided since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded the Northern third in order to prevent its Greek leaders from annexing Cyprus to Greece. If anything, they are likely to give the US Congress further justification to block the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Ankara.

In 2004, a UN-sponsored referendum to reunite the island was backed by the Turkish Cypriots and rejected by the Greeks. Pyla is the sole remaining village on the island where Greeks and Turks live side by side. Ker-Lindsay warned that if allowed to escalate, the spillover effects of the standoff could disrupt the delicate balance there.

The latest round of UN-brokered talks held in 2017 in the Swiss ski resort of Crans Montana saw Turkey agreeing to drastically reduce the number of its troops on the island to pre-1974 levels from an estimated 35,000 currently deployed and returning to a power-sharing agreement between the Greek Cypriot majority and the Turkish minority under the now-defunct 1960 constitution, according to leaked minutes of the meetings. However, then-Cypriot President Nicos Anastiades negotiating on behalf of the Greeks reportedly spurned the opportunity as he faced reelection and pledged to wrest even further concessions. Anastiades denies the claims. Greek Cypriot officials insist that if Turkey were truly serious about a drawdown, it would link it to a timetable.

Since then, Ankara has toughened its stance and ramped up its interference in the north to show that it is no longer interested in Nicosia’s prevarications. In 2020, Ankara decided to let Tatar open the seaside resort of Varosha, sealed off since 1974 as a bargaining chip for future negotiations. At the same time, Turkey dispatched drill ships to the eastern Mediterranean in waters claimed by Cyprus, effectively torpedoing the latter’s plans to exploit gas together with Egypt and Israel and sparking fears of a hot confrontation.

The International Crisis Group reported in April that Ankara has fortified its military positions in the north, stationing drones at an airbase there and has plans to build a naval base in the Trikomo area known as Iskele in Turkish.

Meanwhile, Tatar, the prime minister and a close ally of Erdogan, has been advocating a clean break from the Greeks altogether. For all his hawkish posturing, Erdogan’s position is more nuanced — he is calling for equal status for Turkish Cypriots, rather than outright independence, though he his happy to have his comments interpreted as such.

Against this backdrop, the flare-up in Pyla looks more like an attempt to secure further strategic advantages on the ground, according to Zenonas Tziarras, who teaches Turkish and Middle East studies at the University of Cyprus. “Basically what they want to do is create a new road that will circumvent the British Sovereign Base area and be able to have better mobility as well as move military equipment without being subjected to any control,” Tziarras told Al-Monitor.

“The effort is to expand the control of the Turkish Cypriot administration, question the sovereignty of the Republic of Cyprus and create the conditions for more territorial, economic and military benefits for the Turkish Cypriots,” Tziarras concluded.