When the EU groups Türkiye with Russia and China, it hides more than it reveals and says more about Brussels than about Ankara.
By Asuman Kübra Baş and Unai Gómez-Hernández
In late April 2026, addressing an audience in Hamburg, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that the European Union must “complete the European continent so that it does not fall under Russian, Turkish or Chinese influence.” Within a day, the Commission was issuing a clarification: the remark referred to the Western Balkans, and Türkiye, as a candidate country, has “an additional responsibility in the neighbourhood.”
The reaction in Türkiye unfolded along three lines. Some treated the issue as identity-based: Türkiye belongs to Europe and should not be grouped with Asian powers whose civilisational frameworks differ fundamentally from the European one. Others approached it structurally: a NATO ally, customs union partner, and candidate country had been placed alongside two of Brussels’ declared rivals, exposing a deeper inconsistency in how European institutions still approach enlargement. And a third group treated the framing as honest, in a way: a candid expression of how the EU’s strategic vocabulary has come to position Türkiye, whatever the formal candidacy file still says.
What has been less examined, however, is the thinking that likely sat beneath the framing — beyond well-known issues such as the EU’s enduring inconsistency on Türkiye and member-state divisions over its accession: despite its limits, Türkiye’s footprint in the Western Balkans is substantial and increasingly difficult to overlook.
Start with the EU’s own predicament, because it explains the anxiety behind the remark. For most of the 2010s, enlargement made little progress — candidate status without timelines, conditions applied unevenly, a region that had stopped believing membership would ever come. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed the language: enlargement became a “geopolitical imperative,” a matter of keeping the EU’s south-eastern flank out of hostile hands. Ukraine and Moldova were fast-tracked; the Balkans were told, again, that they mattered. But the machinery never caught up with the rhetoric. Accession still crawls chapter by chapter, slowed by member-state vetoes and uneven conditions, while Brussels watches the vacuum form in its own backyard- Russian meddling, Chinese money in ports and railways- without being able to fill it. That gap, between what the EU wants and what it can do, might be the real reason behind Von der Leyen’s words.
Now look at who is filling the gap, because this is where the “Russian, Turkish or Chinese” shorthand falls apart. The GEO-POWER-EU Interdependence Database tracks each of these actors across political, economic, security and societal ties in all six Western Balkan countries. Set side by side, they are not three versions of the same threat. They are three completely different shapes.
Türkiye’s shape is broad but soft. It shows up in all four dimensions in every one of the six countries — free trade and investment deals, visa liberalisation, defence and policing cooperation, schools, mosques, television. Its diplomatic presence is the only one among the external actors that has grown steadily over the period rather than flatlining. But its hard power is thin: security agreements across most of the region, actual boots on the ground in only two countries. This is influence built through presence rather than pressure.
China is the mirror image: deep in one dimension, absent from the rest. Its weight is economic — trade, loans, infrastructure — concentrated above all in Serbia, with the Budapest–Belgrade railway as its main billboard. Politically, militarily and culturally, it is barely there. Even its economics come with a strategy the EU should watch: through formats like “17+1,” Beijing has courted individual Balkan governments one by one, buying leverage inside a Union it expects them eventually to join. The EU, for the record, remains the region’s dominant investor and trade partner. But China’s is the money that arrives with no reform strings attached, which is exactly why governments take it.
Russia is a third shape again: a declining power, economically lighter than China, with a security presence that is real but shrinking everywhere except Serbia. Moscow’s attention is on Ukraine, and it is defending its remaining footholds rather than building new ones.
Broad and soft, deep-but-narrow, and receding. Reading these three as a single “external influence” does not just blur the differences; it erases the very distinctions that should shape how the EU engages each of them.
None of this makes Türkiye a peer of the EU. Brussels is still, by a distance, the region’s biggest trade partner and investor, backed by public support that stays high and an accession framework no rival can match. But the direction of travel is not fixed in its favour. And for all that separates the three actors von der Leyen named, what they share is not some common design for the region but the EU’s own posture towards it: Ankara, Beijing, and Moscow act while Brussels reacts.
That is the real lesson of von der Leyen’s list. Türkiye’s footprint is broad, but breadth does not mean hostility. The gaps Türkiye fills are gaps the EU left open, which might be seen as a measure of Brussels’ reach, not of Turkish intentions. Casting a candidate country as a rival influence in a region of fellow candidates raises real questions about how credible the accession promise to Ankara still is. So the Hamburg remark is accurate, albeit imprecise: while it is true that Türkiye matters in the Western Balkans, it should not be dropped into the same basket as China and Russia.