Turkey is the arms industry’s new upstart
It has won clients in Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Ukraine and elsewhere
IT HAS LEFT a trail of smouldering Russian-made tanks, trucks and artillery in wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria and Libya. Soon Turkey’s TB2 drone may have a chance to do so again in Ukraine, which has bought dozens of them over the past couple of years and is now bracing for a Russian invasion. On February 3rd Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Turkey’s, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inked a deal to build more of them together. Some of the drones have already seen action. A TB2 destroyed a howitzer used by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region in October. American officials say Russia may have been planning to fake a TB2 strike against civilians as a pretext for war.
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Drones of their own”
Europe February 12th 2022
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