The laser-guided, bomb-carrying drones that have served as an ace up the sleeve for Ukrainian military are made by a corporation with ties to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan–and they seem to be putting a strain on Turkey-Russia relations.
Turkish company Baykar Makina is a private Turkish corporation whose chief technology officer is Selcuk Bayraktar, one of the owners and Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan’s son-in-law. Selcuk Bayraktar who produces the Bayraktar TB2 drones, which have recently disabled multiple Russian launch rocket systems and taken out columns of armored Russian tanks and personnel transporters. Ukraine praised the drone operators’ “jewellery work” in an English-language tweet on Tuesday.
It is not the first time that these crewless aircraft have had a substantial impact on battlefields where Moscow is interested. The aircraft, which are not expensive to manufacture and deploy, have recently helped Turkish allies win fights as far afield as Azerbaijan and Libya.
Several Turkish officials and an executive at a defence company with close government ties told Bloomberg that Ukraine has purchased dozens of Bayraktar TB2s, together with control stations and missiles, since 2019.
During Erdogan’s visit to Kyiv earlier this month, the two countries also agreed to collaborate on a new generation of drones.
Ukraine’s Bayraktar drones fired their first shots in October, destroying mobile artillery in Donbas, a territory where Russian-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian army since 2014, and which Putin cites as one of the reasons for his invasion.
Prior to the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s government set aside land for facilities to manufacture Turkish drones in the country, as the two nations planned to deepen defense sector collaboration, including transferring Ukrainian engine technology to Turkey’s fast-growing armaments producers.
Russian military killed on the go, they held their poses well…. Gostomel, #Kyiv region. Ukraine chaos.
More Russians met their fate.. 😬#Ukraine #RussiaUkraineWar pic.twitter.com/WnjmreSdAj
– TÌ·hÌ·eÌ· Ì·RÌ·eÌ·aÌ·lÌ·iÌ·sÌ·tÌ· (@LegitAnonNews) March 4, 2022
However, Turkey is careful of enraging Moscow and has mostly avoided publicizing the participation of its military hardware in battles in order to prevent jeopardizing economic relations or provoking a military response in countries like Syria.
Russia supplies more than half of Turkey’s gas and is now building a nuclear power plant in the country, while Russian visitors are a big source of revenue. Thousands of Turkish soldiers are stationed in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province, where they might be attacked by government forces backed by Putin.
