NATO member Turkey hopes to eventually join the Moscow-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
Since 2013, Turkey has been an SCO “dialogue partner,” which is generally seen as a first step toward eventual membership in the organization.
Turkey, Mr. Erdogan said, “should now join the Shanghai Five as a permanent member.”
He has already raised the issue, he said, with the leaders of Russia and China.
The Turkish leader made the remarks after attending a three-day NATO summit in Washington, which focused mainly on the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict.
In 1996, Moscow and Beijing founded the so-called “Shanghai Five” to counter perceived Western influence in Eurasia.
Along with Russia and China, the organization’s founding members included Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. When Uzbekistan joined in 2001, the regional bloc officially changed its name to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
India and Pakistan became members in 2017 despite their historical rivalries, and Iran joined the bloc in 2023.
At a major SCO summit in Kazakhstan this week, Belarus—a key Russian ally in Eastern Europe—became the organization’s tenth member.
Held on July 3 and July 4, the summit was attended by most SCO heads of state and the leaders of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
According to its founding charter, the SCO promotes political, economic, and commercial cooperation between member states. The organization, however, is also concerned with joint defense and security.
Last summer, personnel from SCO member states joined military drills in Russia’s central Chelyabinsk region.
Drills are “conducted by the armed forces [of SCO members] and designed to counter-terrorism,” he told Russia’s TASS news agency on July 9.
“In 2025, the [Russian] defense ministry has planned another exercise of this kind,” Mr. Khakimov added without saying where the drills would be held.
Speaking at this month’s SCO summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated calls for a “new architecture of cooperation, indivisible security, and development in Eurasia.”
This “new architecture,” he said in state media, was meant to replace “the outdated Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models that gave unilateral advantages to certain states.”
‘Unique Position’
Last month, Mr. Putin said the SCO is open to all Eurasian states, including NATO members such as Turkey, which joined the Western alliance in 1952. Under Mr. Erdogan, Turkey has maintained good relations with Russia, with which it shares extensive trade ties and a lengthy maritime border.Ankara condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 but has declined to support Western sanctions on Moscow—to the annoyance of its NATO allies.
Turkey also has kept good relations with Kyiv, occasionally allowing it to play the role of mediator.
However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov appeared to pour cold water on Turkey’s hope of joining the SCO—at least in the short term.
“We are aware of Turkey’s ambition to join the SCO,” Mr. Peskov said on July 12, according to state-run media. “But there is a conflict of interest between Turkey’s commitments as a member of NATO and the ideology reflected in the SCO’s founding documents.
“There are certain issues that must be discussed,” he told reporters, without elaborating.
As of publication, Ankara had yet to respond to the Kremlin spokesman’s remarks.
