by Natasha Bertrand

The assassination on Monday of Russia’s ambassador to
Turkey at an art gallery in Ankara is unlikely to fracture
relations between the two countries as they work to improve their
tumultuous relationship, analysts said. “On the contrary, both Russia and Turkey will point to the
murder as reason why they should cooperate more closely in
fighting terrorism,” geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer, president
of the political risk firm Eurasia Group, told Business Insider
on Monday.

“Erdogan will surely express great regret to the Russian,
and acknowledge that Turkey must do more in their domestic
security environment,” Bremmer said, referring to Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “That means more crackdowns at
home, but not a sudden blowup with Moscow.”

The death of the ambassador, Andrey Karlov, immediately prompted
comparisons to the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 that led Austria-Hungary to declare
war on Serbia, which ultimately sparked World War I.

But statements released by Russian and Turkish officials in
the aftermath of Karlov’s death suggested Moscow and Ankara were
determined not to let the incident derail their
rapprochement. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım said in a statement
that the government would not allow the assassination to harm
Russian-Turkish relations.

Erdogan echoed Yildirim’s sentiment,
calling the attack “provocation” aimed at damaging Turkey’s
normalization of ties with Russia. He said that Turkey and Russia
will jointly investigate the assassination, reiterating that
“intense cooperation with Russia” over Aleppo was “helping
to save lives.” “I call out to those who are trying to break this relationship,”
Erdogan continued, “Your expectations are wasted.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, called the
assassination an attempt to “undermine” Russia-Turkey ties and
derail Moscow’s attempts to find, with Iran and Turkey, a
solution for the Syria crisis.

The Kremlin, which declared
the assassination a terrorist attack, said talks
between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Turkish
counterpart, Mevlüt Çavu?o?lu, over Syria would take place as
planned in Moscow on Tuesday.

“Ankara and Moscow will likely seek to avoid a diplomatic
crisis over Karlov’s assassination,” said Boris Zilberman, a
Russia expert at the Washington, DC-based think tank Foundation
for Defense of Democracies. “Russia will, however, likely step up
military actions in Syria and seek revenge against those
connected with the assassin.”

The Turkish government, meanwhile, was apparently preparing to
blame a domestic opposition movement, known as the Gulenists, for
the attack. The movement is led by Turkish preacher Fetullah
Gulen, who has lived in exile in the US since 1999.

The mayor of Ankara alleged
in a tweet shortly after the attack that the gunman was a
Gulenist and that his declarations about Aleppo were merely a
distraction — a narrative that was repeated and expanded upon by
Turkish media in the aftermath of the assassination. A senior
Turkish senior official later told Reuters that Ankara’s
investigation will focus on the gunman’s links to the Gulen
network.

Turkish-Russian relations had been precarious but improving since
Turkey shot down a Russian warplane along the Turkish-Syrian
border in November 2015.

Though they are on opposite sides of the war in Syria, with
Turkey supporting the opposition and Russia supporting Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad, Turkish and Russian officials managed
to broker a deal last week that resulted in a cease-fire and the
evacuation of civilians and fighters from rebel-held eastern
Aleppo.

“Russia will likely not overreact,” Soner Cagaptay,
director of the Turkish Program at The Washington Institute for
Near East Policy, said on Twitter. “Moscow has almost everything
it wants from Ankara in Syria including Turkish acquiescence to
Aleppo’s fall.”

Michael Koplow, a Middle East analyst at the Israel Policy Forum,
said that he thinks Karlov’s assassination “is likely to bring
Russia and Turkey closer together.”

“Neither side has an incentive to escalate things,” Koplow
said. “I anticipate this leading to a joint stand against
terrorism and greater coordination on Syria.”

That is especially true, Koplow said, given Turkey’s
dependence on Russian energy and tourism, and the current
tensions between Turkey and the West over its poor
human-rights record and censorship of the press following a
failed coup attempt in July. Turkey’s government has also blamed
Gulen in the failed coup attempt.

Erdogan’s reluctance to sign on to certain European Union
membership requirements and his increasingly authoritarian
leadership over Turkey have also sparked concern among European
leaders that he is not committed to a Western conception of human
rights and civil liberties.

NATO has also expressed concern over Erdogan’s purging of
thousands of Turkish civil servants — as well as military
personnel, police officers, academics, and teachers — from their
positions on suspicion that they were associated with the coup
attempt.

“Ankara is going to use this as an opportunity to embrace
Russia tighter,” Koplow said. “The analogy to WWI ignores the
fact that there was a host of incentives, including entangling
alliances and multiple competing great powers, that made war a
more obvious choice for the parties involved. That is not the
case here, particularly given that Turkey is hardly a proxy for
the West these days despite its NATO membership.”

Dmitry Gorenburg, an expert on Russian military affairs at
Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, said
that “a lot will depend on how the Russian government chooses to
play it.”

“My initial guess is that the two countries will pledge to
work together against terrorism,” Gorenburg told Business Insider
on Monday. “But we will see soon enough.”