Turan Research Center

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sanctions, political risk, and logistical disruption have pushed governments and shippers to look for routes to Europe that do not cross Russian territory. The chief beneficiary has been the Middle Corridor—the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR)—which runs from China through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian, and on through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey.

The growth has been real. Freight on the TITR rose from 1.5 million tons in 2022 to more than 2.7 million tons in 2023, an 86 percent increase, according to the TITR Association. Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport reported 4.1 million tons over the first eleven months of 2024, up 63 percent year-on-year, with full-year estimates running to roughly 4.5 million tons. The World Bank projects the corridor could triple to some 11 million tonnes by 2030; Kazakhstan is targeting 10 million tons by 2027.

Set against the Northern Corridor, however, those numbers are modest. The Middle Corridor moves roughly 6 percent of the Russian route's 100-million-ton annual capacity. This is the tension at the heart of Turkey's corridor strategy, and it is worth stating plainly at the outset: the route on which Ankara has staked its regional relevance is, by volume, marginal.

This article argues that the Middle Corridor is nonetheless Ankara's most effective instrument in Central Asia—not because of the freight it carries, but because of the position it confers. Turkey has spent three decades trying to convert linguistic and cultural affinity into influence, and cultural diplomacy alone never competed with Chinese capital or Russian security guarantees. The corridor gives Ankara something it has never had: a functional role that Central Asian governments actually need filled. What it does not give Turkey is leverage. China's economic weight, Russia's entrenched security position, and—most importantly—the deliberate multi-vector strategies pursued by Astana and Tashkent ensure that Turkey will be one partner among several, by the region's design rather than despite its efforts.

The corridor's real constraints

Turkey's geography is genuine. The Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway, commissioned in 2017 and upgraded in 2024 to an annual capacity of 5 million tons following reconstruction of its Georgian section, provides the backbone of Ankara's connectivity strategy. But the BTK's own ceiling is a reminder that the corridor's western spine is not built for the volumes its advocates project.

The binding constraints lie further east and are physical rather than political. The Caspian crossing is the corridor's weakest link, and it is deteriorating. Sea levels have fallen by as much as 30 centimeters a year since 2020, driven by reduced Volga inflow and rising evaporation. According to the Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping Company, this has already cut rail tank car ferry transport by 22 percent and wagon transport by 10 percent on the Baku–Kuryk route. Investment continues—Baku is expanding the Port of Alat toward a target capacity of 25 million tons and 500,000 TEU, and Kazakhstan is building out Aktau and Kuryk, including the Sarzha terminal with Abu Dhabi's AD Ports Group—but no amount of port construction raises the water level.

The western end is no more secure. Until the TRIPP route through southern Armenia and Nakhchivan becomes operational, Georgia remains the corridor's sole gateway to Europe. Georgian port capacity is nearing exhaustion, and Tbilisi has cut funding for the new Anaklia port from 150 million lari to 50 million for 2026. Turkey's status as the corridor's western terminus therefore rests on a single transit state with its own political crisis and no evident intention of resolving the bottleneck. This is the strongest version of the case, made recently by Carnegie, that the Middle Corridor may prove a dead end. It deserves to be met rather than ignored: the corridor's ceiling is lower than its boosters admit, and Turkish strategy should be judged against that ceiling, not against the growth curve.

What Turkey has actually built

Ankara's engagement has become markedly more concrete over the past decade, and the record is more substantial than the tonnage suggests.

The Organization of Turkic States, renamed from the Turkic Council in 2021, has expanded cooperation in transport, trade, customs harmonization, and political consultation. It is not a supranational body and shows no sign of becoming one—a fact its member states appear to regard as a feature. What it gives Turkey is a standing multilateral venue that neither Moscow nor Beijing sits in.

Trade has followed. Turkish–Azerbaijani trade reached a record $7.65 billion in 2023, up 31 percent year-on-year. Turkey–Uzbekistan trade stood at $3 billion in 2024, with both governments targeting $5 billion. TurkStat puts Turkey's total trade with OTS member states at $62.6 billion across 2020–2024. Turkish contractors remain among the most active foreign firms in the region.

Defense is where the relationship has moved furthest. Kyrgyzstan acquired at least three Bayraktar TB2s in 2021, among the first Central Asian purchases of the platform, and has since taken delivery of Akıncı and Aksungur systems. Kazakhstan contracted for TAI's ANKA in late 2021, with deliveries completed in 2023; a memorandum on joint production followed in May 2022, and a formal joint venture for ANKA manufacture and maintenance was signed in Astana during President Erdoğan's visit in May 2026, alongside thirteen bilateral agreements spanning defense, transport, energy, finance, and education. Kazakhstan is now the first ANKA production base outside Turkey.

This is the clearest evidence for the thesis—and it also complicates it. Kyrgyz TB2s were reportedly used against Tajikistan during the September 2022 border clashes. Turkish platforms are not merely lubricating regional connectivity; they are entering an armed dispute between two Central Asian states, one of them not Turkic. Ankara's defense exports buy influence, but they also entangle Turkey in quarrels it has no mechanism to arbitrate.

The competition, and the region's own strategy

China remains the structural constraint. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has committed sums across Eurasia that Ankara cannot approach, and Chinese investment in Central Asian rail, energy, mining, and telecommunications far exceeds Turkey's capacity. Turkey does not compete with this and should not pretend to.

Russia's position has weakened but not collapsed. The Collective Security Treaty Organization, bilateral military agreements, migration links, and dense institutional habit continue to give Moscow purchase that Ankara cannot replicate.

Europe is now a third competitor—and, awkwardly for Ankara, a better-capitalized one. At the Global Gateway Investors Forum in Brussels in January 2024, European and international financial institutions pledged €10 billion for Trans-Caspian transport connectivity. At the first EU–Central Asia summit in Samarkand in April 2025, Brussels launched a €12 billion Global Gateway package with the corridor as its flagship. Against the EBRD's estimate that roughly €18.5 billion is needed for regional transport infrastructure, even these sums fall short—but they dwarf what Turkey brings.

The decisive constraint, however, is not any external power. It is the deliberate strategy of the Central Asian states themselves. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have spent three decades constructing multi-vector foreign policies precisely to avoid dependence on any single partner, and they apply that logic to Ankara as readily as to Moscow or Beijing. Kazakhstan's ANKA deal is instructive: it is simultaneously an opening to Turkey and a hedge against Russian defense dependence, taken by a government that continues to balance both. Astana is not choosing Turkey. It is adding Turkey to a portfolio. This is not a limitation Ankara can engineer away. It is the region's settled preference, and any Turkish strategy premised on displacing it will fail.

Conclusion

The freight numbers will not carry Turkey's argument for it. A corridor moving 6 percent of its northern rival's volume, bottlenecked at a shrinking sea and a single strained Georgian gateway, will not make Ankara the pivot of Eurasian trade in this decade or the next.

But that was never the realistic prize. The corridor's value to Turkey is positional rather than commercial: it has given Ankara a functional role in a region where it previously had only rhetoric, and it has converted the Organization of Turkic States from a cultural forum into a body with something to coordinate. The defense partnerships, the co-production agreements, the customs harmonization—these follow from Turkey's usefulness on the route, and they will outlast any particular tonnage figure.

The strategic conclusion for Ankara is therefore uncomfortable but clarifying. Turkey's returns in Central Asia are real, and they are capped. They are capped not by Turkish failure but by Central Asian success: governments that have learned to take what each partner offers without granting any of them primacy. The question for Turkish policy is not how to break that ceiling—it cannot be broken—but whether Ankara can accept a durable secondary position and build on it, rather than continuing to describe its regional role in language its partners have never accepted. The Middle Corridor is Turkey's best instrument in Central Asia. It is also a lesson in how much less that means than Ankara has been willing to say.

Dr. Hande Ortay is a lecturer and researcher in international relations at KTO Karatay University in Konya. Her work spans international politics, European affairs, and social transformation, and she is active in building academic ties abroad, with a particular focus on Africa. She studied political science and international relations at İstanbul Yeni Yüzyıl University.