Turkish is regular, has well specified rules you can learn in a week, is extremeley easy to read (pronounce as written, there's no floating/jumping/changing stress). Oh, and the alphabet is latin-based.

Russian: extremely complicated grammar using concepts entirely alien to English (declensions, inflections, conjugates, grammatical cases, genders, transgressives, and even plurals are weird), has free-form-not-really sentence structure, jumping stress. Oh, and a completely different alphabet to boot.

"the alphabet is Latin based"

Yes, phonetic spelling but you won't be able to read anything much before WW1.

As if that is a required criteria for learning Turkish, or for assessing its difficulty.

Note: 99.9% of Turks are not able to read much of anything before WW1.

Exactly. Historical amnesia which is partly what Kemal Atatürk was after. Year Zero.