The role of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin upon the Turkey-Russia relations within the frame of leader analysis

With aiming to enlighten the dimensions of the effects on which the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Vladimir Putin as leaders who affect the course of current Turkey-Russia relations on a large scale, an assessment based on foreign policy analysis has been made in this thesis study. In a unit- -level analysis, decision making actors can follow different methods such as consultation, reconciliation, competition in policy making processes and pursue different ways like forming alliances, being neutral or strating a war. The role of decison makers has been asked to be emphasized as there will be different realities depending on the decisions taken. From this point on, the leadership codes of these two decision-makers has been compared with each other by mapping the cognitive and personal maps of these leaders with the help of Operational Code Analysis and Leadership Trait Analysis which are the methods of Foreign Policy Analysis and has been analiysed through the data of decision-makers in respect to some kinds of motivations. In the context of Turkey-Russia relations, numerical data from the texts of the leaders' discourse has been analyzed to reveal the link between their characteristic features. The formation of perceptions about outer world and personal features of decision-makers from childhood to adulthood are tried to demonstrate by analysing also the biographies of them with main lines to gain some clues about the constitution of the codes mentioned. By determining the familiar aspects of both of the two leaders' early years of their lifes, the parallel elements between these leaders' characteristics has been tracked. To concretize the situation above mentioned, critical cases such as March 2003 Resolution, the construction of Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, S-400 Agreement, problematic areas such as Crimea, Karabakh, Syria, Libya and Cyprus, July 15 Coup Attempt and the assasination of Andrey Karlov which have occured in bilateral relations are examined. This thesis has defended that, together with the political system and the decision mechanisms they are in with the policies they operate, R. T. Erdogan and V. Putin as two leaders has significant impacts on the course of Turkey-Russia relations beyond the systemic factors and historical backgrounds. For this reason, the focus of the study has been examining these two decision makers in the direction of concrete data by putting a light on the perceptions of the leaders which determine the decisions they take in the frame of Turkey-Russia relations.