Commentary
The coronavirus crisis has impacted Moscow’s Middle Eastern policies, while also creating opportunities.
Dmitri Trenin
Russia's Policy in the Middle East: Prospects for Consensus and Conflict with the United States
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Russia had recovered from its domestic crisis, and so had its global ambitions. While Moscow’s principal interests still lie mostly toward the West, the Middle East is back on Moscow’s radar screen and Russia’s withdrawal from the region has been reversed.
Published on Mar 2, 2010
Source: The Century Foundation
The Middle East is important to Moscow for several reasons – its physical proximity; the Muslim factor, as continuing religious and political turbulence within the Muslim world brings radical ideas and militants from the Middle East into Russia and impacts Russia’s policy in the Caucasus, the central Russian republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, and post-Soviet Central Asia; large emigration from Russia to Israel, where 20 percent of the population are former Soviet Jews; the energy riches of the region; and Russian attention to the current U.S. focus on the region, and American military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Reprinted with permission from The Century Foundation.
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