When Turks head to the polls on Sunday to decide a historic presidential election, the Kremlin will be hoping they give long-standing leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan a convincing victory, observers say.
The winner will have leverage over key areas for Moscow, such as Russia's large-scale military campaign in Ukraine, the war in Syria and the Kremlin's standoff with NATO.
Erdogan, 69, who has ruled Turkey for two decades, won the first round earlier in May, even though polls showed him trailing his 74-year-old rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu.