When Russia found out what Turkey was doing, they in turn started supporting Kurdish separatists:
Turkey and the ChechensIn November, 1994, when the Chechens appeared to be pushing the Russian forces out of Chechnya, the Turks began to receive committed Mujahedins from Bosnia, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran and train them in mountain guerilla warfare techniques, before turning them loose on the Chechen front. It appears that, around the same time, the Turks began to train Uzbek militants of the Erk party. The governments of both Uzbekistan and Russia complained about this, but Turkish officials fiercely denied the allegations.
The Russians could not believe their eyes. The primary reason they had ignored Turkey during their previous investigations was that any Turkish help for Chechen autonomists was seen as defying logic: a possible Chechen victory would encourage other violent independence movements in the Caucasus and beyond, including Abdullah Ocalan's PKK, Turkey's painful military thorn in Anatolia. Yet, it seemed that Turkish foreign policy officials had decided to take that risk, possibly in an attempt to push Russia out of the Caucasus oil fields.
Rather predictably, the Russians decided to respond by allocating resources to PKK and the other Kurdish independence factions, while letting Turkey know that they were doing so. They were hoping that increased Russian interest in the Kurdish dispute would scare off the Turks, who ever since the end of WWII had been particularly concerned about Soviet attempts to infiltrate the Kurdish movement and use it against US-supported Turkish influences in the Muslim-dominated territories of the USSR.
The expected reaction from Turkey came in 1996, when what was described as a 'conference', entitled "The History of Kurdistan" was held in Moscow, organized in partnership by the (PKK-controlled) Kurdistan Committee, the Kurdistan Liberation Front and the Russian Nationalities and Regional Policy Ministry. When the Turkish ambassador to Moscow complained, he was told that Russia would withdraw support from the Kurdish cause when it had firm evidence that Turkey had dropped its covert support for an independent Muslim Chechen republic.
Thus, this tit-for-tat game has been unfolding ever since. Turkey has been publicly condemning the violent tactics of Chechen paramilitaries, while at the same time assisting them, in an attempt to keep the strong Chechen lobby in Turkey happy. Indeed, the grass-roots support for the Chechen cause in Turkey should not be underestimated: it is claimed that there are today approximately 70,000 Chechens living in Turkey, while up to 10 million Turks trace their immediate ancestry to the Caucasus. Consequently, dozens of Chechen and other Caucasian solidarity associations are active throughout the nation.