RUSSIAN ACROBATICS IN THE INDO-PACIFIC

by Orietta Moscatelli

1. It is easy in Moscow to say “Eastward ho! Full speed ahead toward the Pacific”. In reality, the expansion of the BAM – the legendary Baikal-Amur railway designed to secure and defend Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East – is still dragging on. The vast territories of the north impose high costs, and skilled labour is in short supply as a result of Covid-19 and conscription for the Ukrainian front. The attempt to employ prisoners on a voluntary basis has only served to evoke the times when political prisoners were sent to work and die for the ‘Project of the Century’. With its burden of history, tragedy, and expectations, the Baikalo-Amurskaya Magistrale is a centrifuge of Russian aspirations and fears associated with the more distant and resource-rich territories. For Russia the rise of the Indo-Pacific region entails possibilities and risks, both of which are strategically significant.

Delays on the Baikal-Pacific route are nothing new. A railway artery parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway but further away from the Chinese border, Stalin planned to have it built in a few years, confirming the Russian leadership’s tendency to underestimate certain latitudes. In spite of the massive use, and massacre, of prisoners conveyed by the General Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps (Gulag), the work was only partially carried out and then forgotten for twenty years after the great helmsman’s death. It was later relaunched and elevated to a pan-Soviet federal project. It was relaunched in 1974 with the dispatch of thousands of young Komsomol activists: singing, dancing, propaganda, sweat, and tensions on the border with China all urged to hurry up. The recent armed clashes that had lapped the Trans-Siberian Railway encouraged the push to double the railway at a safe distance from the unstable border. In the end, work took almost ninety years and the last 54 kilometres came to fruition a week before fall of the Berlin Wall, turning the undertaking into a gigantic memorial to the USSR. In the pro-West 1990s, the 4,324 kilometres of the most expensive project ever undertaken by the Communist Empire were dismissed as ‘the road to nowhere’.

Everything changed again with povorot na Vostok, the turn to the East sealed by Vladimir Putin against the backdrop of rising tensions with the West. The year 2014 marked the annexation of Crimea, the mega-contract to supply energy to China and – less noticed – the launch of the BAM 2.0 plan for a new line. After that, the invasion of Ukraine finally brought the initiative back into vogue. Today, the Baikal-Amur is once again the ‘gateway to the Pacific’, a transport artery put to the test by the reorientation of the economy and the connection with the Indo-Pacific macro-region where the decisive game for the future world order is being played out. And where, for Moscow, the multipolarity invoked in unison with Beijing proves to be an extremely complex undertaking.

Approaches conceived for an essentially peaceful context are faltering. The landscape is changing as well as the weight of regional organisations: pursuing the role of the needle of the scales between opposing interests requires great effort. Russia resorts to highly variable geometries to hold together growing cooperation with China, the need to diversify with respect to this relationship, and the needs imposed by the war gamble in Ukraine. The partnership with North Korea, including the military alliance, must be placed in this context. All this constitutes a shift of consequences that are difficult to foresee in the medium term, while in the meantime welding the theatre of war on Russia’s western flank with the tensions that lap the Federation’s eastern offshoots.

2. Even the newfound interest in the permafrost-defying railway follows the complex dynamics of the (increasingly) great conflict between China, Russia, various fellow travellers, and the West. The BAM is the logistical hinterland of the Arctic route – the northern sea route that cuts shipping time to Asian markets that turns out to be very useful in times of sanctions and when the European continent is closed to Russian trade flows. Together with the Trans-Siberian Railway, it is an important part of a multimodal system that Moscow has been developing at an accelerated pace since the onset of war, with priority given to the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). The West-Pacific route complements the urgent need to connect St Petersburg to the Caspian and Iran, then to Central Asia and especially India. And from there to the rest of the Global South, providing everyone with alternatives to the Red Sea, the Bosporus, and European ports. In short, it is the infrastructural network of Greater Eurasia, an ideal and strategic design to be grafted onto the interaction with Beijing and at the same time an antidote to excessive Sinisation. Driven by the congenital anxiety of ending up marginalised, Russia is committed to diversification and maintains interlocutions that are not appreciated by Beijing. It is a need implicit in the Kremlin’s mantra that Asia’s ‘new centres of development’ will soon send Euro-Atlantic dominance and models to the dustbin for good. In the same spirit, the Russian President emphasised last April that ‘at the turn of the century, the BAM helped to open up the markets of the Asia-Pacific region to the Russian economy, provided a reliable transit route for the whole of Eurasia and, in a single connection with the Trans-Siberian Railway, became a truly strategic transport corridor, not only of national but also global importance’.

Asia-Pacific, indeed. Like Beijing, Moscow sees the concept of the Indo-Pacific as a child of plans to contain the People’s Republic and the renewed American desire to create a system of opposing blocs: now in Asia between the Chinese and US allies as during the Cold War in Europe between the USSR and satellites against NATO countries. More softly, and more profoundly, increased interest in the Indo-Pacific is perceived as a threat to Russia’s role in an ‘enlarged’ Asia that underlies the idea of Greater Eurasia. This is a matter of difficult conjuncture but also of strategic DNA. Net of its four fleets, being spread over two continents Russia prefers the land dimension, in which it holds the world record. The seas are of influence, the warm seas its all-time ambition, the Mediterranean the only one to which it has permanent access since the 18th century. It is true that the Pacific Fleet has been in the process of being strengthened for a decade. But ten years after the collapse of the USSR, it had been reduced by 50 per cent, despite the area of competence extended from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean, as far as the Persian Gulf: a maritime translation of the concept of ‘road to nowhere’ used for the BAM railway by the reformers of the early post-Soviet era.

Until recently, the Indo-Pacific was simply too far from the Russian centre of gravity. In the latest (2022) US strategy for the region, the White House never mentions Russia, an absence that must have contributed to Moscow’s wake-up call. In the Russian foreign policy strategy updated in 2023, the Asia-Pacific region rose to fourth place in terms of stated priorities compared to seventh in the previous (2016) draft. Between the two editions, the Quad, a group that brings together the United States, Australia, Japan and even India, was founded, getting the Indo-Pacific concept off the ground, followed in 2021 by the first AUKUS Summit, a military alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom, and America that is in the process of enlargement. For the Kremlin, this confirmed that it is now in a new phase that has China in its sights and therefore the anti-Western axis of which it feels the ideal and operational vanguard. In short, Moscow cannot afford to stand by and watch the geopolitical maelstrom that it has amply stimulated by sending tanks into Ukraine, on pain of depowering the entire Asian continent and consequently the world. In the Asia-Pacific, or Indo-Pacific as it may be, the former superpower sees its global aspirations at stake: no longer super, but nevertheless indispensable and therefore in a position to draw dividends in the east and in the south. Perhaps in time, in the west again.

3. In the first version of the turn towards Asia, more than a decade ago, Russia aimed to hook its Far East into the fast-growing Asian dynamics. Such a miracle would have relaunched integration with the former Soviet republics in the name of shared economic interests. Indeed, Moscow has been moving in this direction for years, with a progressive engagement in ASEAN, Southeast Asia’s main intergovernmental organisation, and supporting groups with greater Russian specific weight such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Russia-India-China Platform (RIC). This last, strange triangulation was born in 1998 out of Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov’s conviction that it was necessary to take action for a ‘counterbalance to the Western alliance’ by promoting a Sino-Indian cohabitation that borders on the oxymoronic. The evanescent RIC gave a rare moment of satisfaction to Russian diplomatic aspirations in 2020, when Moscow facilitated negotiations after clashes on the Sino-Indian border in the western Himalayas.

After more than a thousand days at war on its western flank, Russia is on the whole very active around its opposite Asian extensions. Immediately after the first AUKUS summit, a fatigued Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was sent on a hectic tour – China, South Korea, India, and Pakistan – to signal that Moscow in that part of the world intends to continue talking to everyone. Vietnam is also firmly on the list of interlocutors to be courted and the Kremlin went to great lengths to secure Putin’s recent visit to Hanoi, where he landed in June directly from North Korea. A flurry of relationships that neither can nor will obscure the first place inevitably reserved for China, the cross and delight of Russia’s momentum against the American-led globalised order.

In the Far East of the Federation, the potential as well as the obstacles to harmony between the two countries are evident, in spite of the famous memorandum signed by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in February 2022, that of friendship without limits. The formula has meanwhile disappeared from summit declarations, but the ‘Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development’ remains the manifesto of the willingness to work together against American overreach. There are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation, the document warned, alluding among other things to the possibility of a future military alliance. A judicious degree of vagueness, elevated in the official discourse to a new paradigm, and a guarantee of mutual respect ensure the strange couple the elasticity needed to avoid falling apart. In concrete terms, Beijing has more than one reason to dislike the Russian war adventure, yet there has not been the estrangement predicted by many after the invasion of Ukraine. On the contrary, China has acted as a lifesaver for the Russian economy and has pursued a diplomatic line that is cautious but in essence defends the motives of its former Soviet comrade. Thus the war has added new threads to an increasingly asymmetrical bond.

Moscow has become the main supplier of energy and raw materials at necessarily discounted prices. It buys vehicles, microelectronics components, equipment, and various technologies, in a total reversal of the nature of trade relations in the first decade of the century, when like much of the world, Russia was essentially importing cheap consumer goods from its Asian neighbour. The expected Chinese investments in the Russian East, however, have arrived as if with a dropper, concentrated in the energy and petrochemical sectors, disappointing many Russian supporters of the turn towards Asia. On the other hand, military cooperation is on the rise, and Vladimir Putin occasionally throws in a reference to a fateful military pact that neither he nor Xi Jinping wants, while talk of it is convenient for both. Joint exercises are multiplying. The impressive naval drills organised in September 2024 in the Indo-Pacific Ocean saw the participation of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Deployed on five seas, the Kremlin chief presented them as a response to the growing military presence ‘of the United States and its satellites […] near Russia’s western borders, in the Arctic and the Asia-Pacific region’.

Which is intended to mean that the front in Ukraine does not prevent Russia from being present elsewhere, and that China may very well need the Russians in the future. The militarist drive in the East is pure theory for now, most Russian analysts believe that Moscow could and would not want to get involved in a war in the South-East Pacific. Should things come to a head, logic would suggest a line of indirect support similar to China’s in Ukraine. An open conflict would, however, pose a real threat to the Russian Far East, it is reasoned, and the blockade of the seas would elevate the Eurasian transport corridors to the degree preferred by the Russians: unassailable. For this reason, but not for this alone, the reference to the Arctic is significant and concerns both the West and Beijing.

Last year, the People’s Republic obtained the use of the Russian port of Vladivostok for its domestic commercial traffic, a sensational development described by the Russian side as a possibility for inland development that will benefit from the traffic of goods leaving and arriving from the Pacific port of call. In any case a delicate bet for a country at war on the basis of Tsarist-flavoured territorial claims, given that the Chinese had to cede Vladivostok to the Tsar in 1870. When in 2020 Russia set in its constitution the impossibility of changing its borders, it was not only thinking of Crimea or other imminent declarations of annexation in Ukraine. For now, the fact that matters is that the Chinese, in the event of regional war events, would find themselves with a de facto base overlooking Japan, with which, by the way, Russia has dismissed any possibility of dialogue over the Kuril Islands dispute.

In times of (precarious) peace, cohabitation in Vladivostok aims at the Arctic route which is linked to the Indo-Pacific by force of geography and which Russia opens to China in the spirit of pragmatism imposed by the withdrawal of Western capital. With NATO States guarding the entrance from the Barents Sea and the Bering Strait, the economic and military dimensions are inseparable in the Arctic. Significant Chinese investments and new steps in security cooperation confirm that the interests of the surprising pair here tend to converge, at least for now. In particular, the China National Petroleum Corporation and the Silk Road Fund own respectively 20% and 9% of Yamal LNG, a natural gas production and liquefaction system that uses the northern sea route, but which Putin would like to connect to China via pipeline. This year for the first time, Beijing sent a unit of its Coast Guard for joint patrols with Russia in the Bering Sea, right across Alaska. The People’s Republic is helping Moscow digitise the Arctic route with the Polar Express submarine cable to provide Internet via Russian telecommunication companies from 2026, while a Gazprom subsidiary develops a satellite system that will provide broadband to this waterway made navigable by melting ice: dual-use technology, civil and military surveillance. Overall, China at this stage is helping Russia to maintain strategic control over the area.

4. The snapshot of Sino-Russian cooperation justifiably worries the NATO countries placed at the mouths of the Arctic. It projects the game at the roof of the world in the framework of global confrontation in which Russia feels itself a protagonist. Yet it does not do away with Russian fears of finding at some point the Chinese neighbour transformed into a new hegemon. In essence, the rise of the Indo-Pacific competes with the idea of a Greater Eurasia and a future without the diktat of a single great power. In this circuit where two poles risk contact for opposite reasons, Russian geopolitical manoeuvres tend towards acrobatics.

The Federation insists on inviting India, a tropical power interested in the ice of the Arctic for several reasons: energy, climate, maritime routes that could serve as alternatives to ‘its’ Indian Ocean and therefore to be kept together. With the ally of Soviet times that joined the American camp with many exceptions, Russia exercises inclusiveness. It invites it to regionalism both north and south, in the latter case proposing to connect the Chennai terminals to Vladivostok, taking into account ‘the possibility of calling at other Russian ports’, as the Ministry of Eastern Development points out. Beijing does not like the prospect of seeing droves of Indian ships plying the South China Sea but it does not veto it because a veto would not be in the spirit of friendship without declared limits. China sends out signals, and spreads them. On the occasion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Moscow in July, a suggestive article in The Global Times pointed out that in the long run the Arctic could become a place of trilateral China-Russia-India cooperation, but for now it cannot be done.

The same English-language newspaper, published by the Chinese Communist Party, took care to deny irritation over the military alliance pact concluded in June between Russia and North Korea, which Beijing would have gladly done without. Vladimir Putin landed in Pyongyang with the primary objective of boosting North Korean support in Ukraine, offering Kim Jong-un a unique opportunity to diversify from Beijing’s tutelage. And, arguably, enjoying the calculated risk of placing a shot in China’s closest backyard with the reinstatement of a 1961-dated partnership that provides for ‘military and other assistance by all means at its disposal without delay’ in the event of an attack on either country. ‘The top Russian priority is ammunition and military material. Then you raise your hand and wave at Beijing, look where they are, but that’s secondary,’ says a government adviser commenting on the Russian President’s trip to North Korea. According to Washington, North Korea sent at least 16 thousand containers of ammunition and war materials to Russia in one year. And after signing the agreement, thousands of North Koreans arrived in various Russian locations to be trained, up to 15 thousand men according to American, South Korean, and Ukrainian sources, with estimates varying widely. No one in Moscow confirms this, but it is pointed out that thousands of foreign soldiers, even poorly integrated with Russian forces, could make a difference in the Russian oblast of Kursk, to close the delicate chapter of the Ukrainian incursion, avoiding a new level of escalation implied by sending North Koreans directly to Ukraine. In any case, the first developments of the agreement spread to the shaky balance on the Korean peninsula, where Seoul immediately threatened to send war aid to Kiev.

For Vladimir Putin, the North Korean contribution is worth the butterfly-effect game and sends China’s inevitable discontent into the background. It’s certainly worth a day in the company of the world’s most isolated and most bizarre leader, including the snickers and giggles. However, in Russia only a tiny minority grasps the asymmetry between the two heads of state and few notice the interference in the Chinese camp. Rather, it is emphasised that the North Korean regime is looking for guarantors of its survival and, given the accumulated debt, the Kremlin could not escape it. It could and would not. Under sanctions and on a total collision course with the West, Russia can dare a degree of recklessness with Pyongyang that Beijing cannot afford. But the new flag placed on the Korean peninsula is also an investment with respect to the all too powerful Chinese friend.

The agreement that potentially upsets the balance of power in East Asia brings back almost word for word the agreement made by the Soviet Union with Kim Il-sung, grandfather and unequalled model of the current Kim. The mutual defence mechanisms envisaged then have never been invoked, and today’s version is equally vague. In this uncertain framework, Moscow emphasises the defensive nature of the alliance and cites the objective of maintaining strategic stability in the North-East Asian region, playing with skilful ambiguity on the idea that the war, which is already big, is destined for further enlargement. Meanwhile, it cashes in.

The Russians also intend to import cheap North Korean labour for the homeland economy depleted of workers by the pandemic and the war. Here, too, the common past serves to inspire. In the backlash against the railway to the Pacific, Russian blogs recall how North Koreans in Soviet times contributed in their own way to the construction of the BAM. They felled forests to make room for construction sites, and under a special agreement they would leave in the USSR a part of the timber as payment for the remainder to be sent home via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Translated by Dr Mark A. Sammut Sassi