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Why it matters: Turkey has been conducting energy exploration in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and western Black Sea. Ankara's activities in the eastern Mediterranean have been a source of major contention between Greece, Cyprus and Turkey over conflicting territorial claims.  The tensions reached a high point last October when Turkish forces turned back a Cypriot research vessel for allegedly entering Turkish territory. Yet, revival of the exploratory talks between Ankara and Athens last year offered a diplomatic offramp to the escalation. In March, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, following third round of talks between the two parties on Feb. 22

Ankara controls large swathes of territory in northern Syria, but its previous attempts at establishing a continuous 30-kilometer-deep safety zone along the entirety of the Turkish-Syrian border have so far failed. Turkish troops and their affiliates still do not control a stretch of around 70 kilometers east and west of the city of Kobani, as well as a larger portion of territory around the city of Qamishli, all the way to the Tigris River in the east

Ankara may be calculating that Russia, otherwise busy with the protracted invasion of Ukraine, may not have the time and resources to prevent a new Turkish incursion, nor the political legitimacy to object to it given its own operations in Donbas

With Erdoğan facing dramatically unfavorable preelection polls and a dire economic situation, including sky-rocketing inflation and declining levels of foreign investment, his temptation to rally voters around the flag and silence criticism from the opposition coalition on a subject of national interest is obvious

Turkey and Romania have scrambled in recent days to neutralize potentially explosive mines amid concerns that the weapons may be drifting across the Black Sea from Ukraine’s shores toward neighboring countries.

Turkey’s government had said previously that it was in contact with both Moscow and Kyiv about the weapons, but did not specify which side, if either, was responsible for the mines

Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, claimed on March 19 that poor weather had caused more than 400 naval mines to become disconnected from the cables that were anchoring them, and warned that the mines were “drifting freely in the western part of the Black Sea,” which includes the territorial waters of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.