Just a year ago, Russia seemed to be a rising power in the Middle East, and many regional powerhouses were looking forward to developing their relationships with Moscow due to the widespread belief that US policymakers were rethinking the US role in the region.
Major Middle East nations, once key US allies, have been devoting significant attention to Russia and China, and to a lesser extent India, as the US has been debating its foreign policy in the region.
They have also been showing considerable independence from the US on issues ranging from energy policy to approaches to regional and world conflicts.
Russia, on the other hand, has been seeking greater influence in the region, entering into a growing power competition with the US and seeking to impact prospects for managing conflicts in the Middle East.
However, last week’s short-lived coup attempt by the Wagner Group has raised questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power and come at a crucial moment for his war in Ukraine. It may now make Middle East governments rethink their attitudes towards Russia’s position in the new regional alignment.
Perhaps the one thing that policymakers in the Middle East can share with colleagues in the rest of the world about the aborted Wagner Group insurrection is that Russia could now be a much weaker and more uncertain ally in bringing benefits and potential advantages to the region.
Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin staged his brief insurrection on 23 June when he and his fighters exited Ukraine and sent a column of armoured vehicles bearing Wagner mercenaries towards Moscow after taking over the city of Rostov-on-Don, a busy logistics centre for the Ukraine war.
The rebellion began when Prigozhin accused Russian troops of carrying out a deadly attack on his men in a targeted missile strike. His soldiers then marched towards Moscow with dozens of tanks and fighting vehicles in tow. Reports suggested that clashes took place with the Russian army, and Putin referred to “fallen hero pilots” in a statement on 25 June.
The revolt ended after Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko negotiated a deal with Prigozhin offering the Wagner fighters immunity and allowing the mercenaries’ chief himself to fly to Belarus in exchange for Russia dropping criminal charges against him.
However, the Kremlin has announced that it will continue investigating the insurrection.
The mutiny struck at the heart of the Russian war effort, and Ukraine’s army sought to take frontline advantage of the mayhem. With a Ukrainian counteroffensive already underway, Kyiv has reportedly capitalised on the chaos by pushing back Russian forces in Ukraine and recording a number of gains.
Ukrainian forces claim to have liberated several villages, including some in the Donetsk region, a staging post for Russian troops.
It may be too soon to judge how the infighting in Russia will affect the war and Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive to try to wrest back occupied territory. But Western assessments have concluded that it has laid bare Putin’s vulnerability and turned the spotlight on the divisions within Russia’s military machine and possible disloyalty.
Even with the largely muted reactions from inside Russia, the rebellion must have shaken Russian politics, weakened public faith in Putin, and challenged his 23-year rule. The Russian people must be grappling with how it was possible for a renegade force of government-sponsored mercenaries to put on such a humiliating show of force.
Ukraine and its Western allies will certainly try to exploit any power struggle in Russia in order both to create opportunities to wear down the Russian army and to bring drastic changes to the frontlines of the Ukraine war. Moreover, they may aim at deepening the crack in Moscow’s political elites and increasing their dissatisfaction with Putin.
Facing an era of daunting challenges to its regional security system, the Arab world and many of its governments have counted on a new multipolar Middle East system coming into being featuring the increased participation of Russia and China. They will now be reexamining the prospect of such an order forming.
If the Wagner Group uprising spells more trouble for Putin, and the Kremlin shows more ineptitude in managing its international enterprises, Russia will be ill-positioned to contend with the Middle East dynamics that represent the changing role of the world powers in the region.
Russia has for years been expanding its relationships with major powers in the Arab world such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), driven by waning US interests in the region. Russia also has close political and economic ties with Israel, Iran, and Turkey, and it has been trying to play a balancing act in a very complex geopolitical arena.
With fears of a geopolitical void being created by the purported US “withdrawal” from the Middle East, these Arab countries have showed a desire to seek other powerful partners to ensure regional security, considering that Russia, along with China, might fit the bill.
Both Moscow and Beijing have expressed interests in contesting US power in the region through a combination of political and economic influence.
Another sign of increasing Russian influence in the Middle East has been the growing relationship between Moscow and Tel Aviv. Thanks to the expanded Russian military presence in Syria, Russian-Israeli relations have expanded tremendously to the extent that Russia has been taking greater account of Israeli security interests in its push to counter Iran and its proxies in Syria.
Most Arab countries have remained ambivalent about Russia and chose not to align themselves with the US-led Western push to isolate and punish Russia at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. This was best summed up by the collective diplomatic stance at the Arab Summit in November 2022, which failed to condemn the Russian invasion.
Perhaps potential partnerships with Russia have been most significantly manifested by cooperation by Arab oil-producers, especially Saudi Arabia and GCC members, within the framework of the so-called OPEC Plus oil-production arrangement.
The joint mechanism was launched in 2016 in order to control oil prices in the face of Western governments and to prioritise fossil fuel production.
The arrangement expanded steadily after the outbreak of the Ukraine war despite repeated requests from US and EU leaders to ramp up oil production in order to alleviate pressures on the global economy and help to tame inflation worldwide.
Despite facing a balancing act in their relationships with traditional Western partners, the Arab countries and other key Middle Eastern nations have boosted their cooperation with Russia in armaments, nuclear technology, and some key economic sectors such as trade, tourism and transport.
In addition to being top destinations for Russian food exports and tourism, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have showed interest in Russian weapons. Egypt, a major destination for Russian tourists, is also a top weapons importer from Russia, and nuclear cooperation between the two countries reached a milestone when they laid the foundations for a third nuclear reactor at the Al-Dabaa nuclear plant in May.
Turkey and Iran, which maintain strong political ties with Russia, have been major trading partners. In the present context of global connectivity there have been reports of the three countries considering deals to build a joint railway network linking up with other countries as part of an embryonic international trade corridor.
The Russian TASS news agency reported last month that Russia will launch its first container train to Saudi Arabia from the South Urals through Turkmenistan and Iran. Russian companies are already helping to modernise Egypt’s railways, with 1,300 new train carriages and $900 million worth of railway track being provided to do so.
It goes without saying that in recent years Russia has been riding high in the Middle East, where Moscow wants to be seen as being on an equal footing with the US and as a regional power-broker.
Its military intervention in Syria has changed the course of that country’s Civil War, and Russia has also exploited the chaos in Libya by sending in private military and security contractors, specifically the Wagner Group.
A closer look, however, shows that Russia’s strategic objective in the Middle East is to secure its geopolitical interests in the Arabian Gulf, the Mediterranean Basin, and North Africa as part of a centuries-old quest for warm-water ports and access to the outside world.
The strategy was part of Cold War politics during the Soviet era and was reinvigorated by Putin in order to keep Russia a main player in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
But as the dust settles after the Wagner revolt, the Middle East powers now face tough questions about the future of Russia’s foreign policy and how the uncertainty in the war in Ukraine might affect Russia’s involvement in the region and whether it will try to rearrange its priorities.
The Kremlin has quickly moved to manage and mitigate the consequences of the mutiny on its foreign policy. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that Russia is resilient and will emerge stronger after the failed mutiny, so the West need not worry about stability in a country that possesses one of the world’s largest nuclear forces.
Unsurprisingly, the fallout from the dramatic developments in Russia must now be under scrutiny in major Middle Eastern capitals in order to try to figure out what impact they will have on the ongoing transformation in the regional order as the Arab countries seek to diversify their partnerships while managing their geopolitical interests.
Russia’s image might have been undermined by the brief period of mayhem in the country, yet the question that regional policymakers will now face is not whether Moscow is still seen as a major partner for the region, but if the Arab countries should recalibrate their response to insulate the region against risks from competition between the major world powers.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 July, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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