Turchia e Russia nel vicinato comune. Cooperazione e competizione nel Caucaso meridionale.

The regional dimension has gained a decisive value for the rethinking of the role and the position of Turkey and the Russian Federation on the international contemporary scenario. By virtue of geographical, historical and cultural factors, Ankara and Moscow are naturally projected towards a multi-regional dimension. Therefore, notwithstanding different degrees of power and leverage, they are active and influential actors in various, common regional scenarios, stretching from the Western Balkans to the Central Asian steppes. Among the scenarios towards which both Ankara and Moscow project their influence, the South Caucasus, the only shared neighbourhood between the two actors, is certainly one of the most relevant. Looking at the evolution of Ankara and Moscow Caucasian policies and analysing the dynamics that favoured the alignment of the respective interests, the paper aims at empirically highlighting the gap between the tactical convergences and the strategic differences that emerge between the Russian great power and the Turkish middle one. In particular, starting from an assessment of re- spective goals and tools for influence, the pa- per will focus on endogenous and exogenous factors hampering Turkish regional strategy as well as on the reasons weakening Ankara’s bargaining power vis-à-vis regional partners. Both will finally be employed in order to shed light on the creeping strategic competi- tion between Turkey and Russia and, broadly speaking, on the limitations of the relation- ship between the two actors.