Russia under Putin in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Soviet Legacy, Flexibility, and New Dynamics

Introduction

Recently Russia has become one of the most important geopolitical players in the Eastern Mediterranean. Located in direct proximity to the Black Sea region, the Eastern Mediterranean basin is an important subregion for Russian military, economic and political interactions, which are closely interwoven with Moscow’s strategy vis-à-vis the Caspian Sea region, the Greater Middle East and the European Union (EU). Unlike countries such as France or Italy, the Mediterranean was relatively marginal within Russian intellectual thought, but it became important to Soviet foreign policy from the 1960s onwards and has held similar significance for present-day Russia since 2013. Due mostly to its hard power assets, Moscow instrumentalized the Mediterranean as an essential space for political manoeuvres with regard both to the countries of the Greater Middle East and to the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

This article analyses the evolution of this Russian strategy towards the Eastern Mediterranean. I argue that Moscow’s activity there has served the aims of its foreign and security policy, which seeks to weaken NATO by deepening existent cleavages and to generate new tensions among its members. Russia regards the Eastern Mediterranean as part of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, which offers various fields in which the geopolitical, economic, and other interests of NATO and its close allies clash. Reaching out towards the Eastern Mediterranean, Moscow was able to exert influence on migration flows, energy-related tensions and weapons’ markets. And the current military build-up, allegedly to prevent an eventual attack against Russia’s western and southern flanks, is exploited for propaganda purposes. Russia’s military and political presence in the Mediterranean is designed to demonstrate the Kremlin’s firm political will and unwavering decisiveness with regard to transboundary interaction and to showcase its military ability as well as the achievements of its national military-industrial complex.

Eight years ago, on 23 May 2014, during the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared the “unipolar world”, a world order dominated by the US, to be doomed: “the world has been changing really rapidly. We do see tremendous geopolitical, technological and structural changes. The unipolar model of the world order is faced with fiasco. Nowadays, it is obvious to everyone, even to those who still try to act within the usual pattern” (Putin zaiavil, Interfaks, 23 May 2014).

The current Russian establishment, and in particular Putin’s entourage, view the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century”, as Putin told the Russian Parliament in a 2005 speech (Osborn 2005: 23). The US-favoured expansion of NATO eastwards in the 1990s was repeatedly criticized and condemned by Russian politicians and intellectuals close to the Kremlin. Russians refer to the breach of the unwritten but allegedly oral promise by US and Western European leaders that NATO would not be expanded eastwards (Kramer and Sarotte 2014; Pifer 2014). Indeed, in 1999, several former countries in the USSR-led Warsaw Pact, including Poland, Hungary and other states, became full NATO members. The Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine that began the following year brought pro-Western figures and their allies into office in Tbilisi and Kyiv. Russia failed to hinder those processes at that time (Herd 2005).

Though it radically reformed its military forces since the Russian–Georgian war of 2008 (Lavrov 2018), Russia nonetheless realized that its military and economic capabilities were not sufficient to outnumber NATO or the US military arsenal distributed among their bases worldwide. Perceiving NATO as the adversary, Russian siloviki—top officials in the Ministries of Defense and Interior, as well as Domestic and Foreign Intelligence—elaborated a mixed strategy of hybrid combat, based on active diplomacy and agitation efforts that would deepen existing cleavages within NATO. Moscow may have supported European leftist and communist parties during the Cold War, but nowadays the Kremlin focuses on far-right and populist parties like the National Front (Front National, FN) in France and the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) in Germany (Oliveira 2016; Polyakova 2014; Applebaum 2019). With the boosting of Russian information technologies, Moscow demonstrated its ability to meddle in election campaigns in the US (Jones 2019).

The main achievement of Russia’s hybrid strategy against the West has been its success in instrumentalizing the disintegrative trends within NATO and the EU, and decisively deepening its relations with certain key countries within the transatlantic security mosaic such as Germany, France and Turkey. The energy project Nord Stream 2 with Germany, close cooperation with France in backing general Khalifa Haftar in Libya (Duclos 2020) and the deal with Turkey over the Russian anti-missile protection system S-400 have been complemented by Russian involvement as an intermediary in the Arab–Israeli conflict and in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program along with its aggressive, hard power–based policy with regard to Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. By meddling in election campaigns and backing disintegrative political forces in Europe, Russia seeks to launch or abet destabilizing dynamics in other regions that it can profit from. And the Eastern Mediterranean, with its conflicts over (exploited and still untapped) gas fields, its maritime routes to and from the Black Sea as well as its close relation to other parts of the Middle East, is a sophisticated space in which Russian diplomacy and strategy can be applied, with the aim of generating new dynamics in the area’s regional politics (Stanič and Karbuz 2021). The US historian of Russia Dmitrii Shlapentokh has pointed out that “Moscow has been more flexible and more successful in its maneuvering than Washington, which still believes, in neo-con fashion, in bending practically everyone to its will” (Shlapentokh 2021, 133). This nexus of diplomatic and strategic tools has produced obvious successes in the last decade, which can be explained not only by the alleged withdrawal of the US from the Middle East and the Mediterranean but also by Russian activism and its traditionally profound expertise in Near and Middle East–related area studies.

Russia has no Eastern Mediterranean strategy per se but issues several regularly updated programmatic papers on national security, maritime security and military as well as foreign policy doctrine, which reflect threat perceptions and are designed for both a Russian and an international readership. These papers, along with official statements of the Russian leadership and of Russian as well as international scholars, were studied over the course of writing this article (Borshchevskaya and Eljarh 2018; Bregolat 2018; Cristiani 2020; Delanoë 2014; Gorenburg 2019; Litsas 2016; Malysheva 2015; Pierini 2020, 2021; Pinko 2021; Popov 2021; Rettman 2020; Triana 2017; Ülgen and Kasapoğlu 2021; Zonova 2015). The article is divided into several thematically organized sections which present the Russian policy towards the Eastern Mediterranean during the last decade in a longue durée perspective. The last section addresses the (potential) impact of the Russian large-scale war against Ukraine begun in February 2022 on the Eastern Mediterranean region.

Tsarist, Soviet and Post-Soviet Continuities

The Eastern Mediterranean has been ascribed a certain regional thread within Western intellectual thought, which recently Russian observers have begun to employ. However, this notion has been only of minor use within the geopolitical and cultural discourses of the Russian intelligentsia and ruling class. In the Russian mental map, the two basins of the Black and Mediterranean seas “communicate” via the Turkish Straits; it was once a dream of Tsarist Russia to besiege Constantinople in order to control its inter-sea communication. Thus the Eastern Mediterranean was seen as a maritime borderland between the Black Sea and the rest of the Mediterranean, which Russia would control were the Ottoman capital under its occupation. And indeed the Tsarist Empire launched several wars against the weakened Ottoman Empire after Catherine the Great succeeded in occupying the Crimean Khanate, an Ottoman vassal state, in 1783. Less than twenty years later, Russia absorbed the Kingdom of Georgia and controlled vast seashores along the Black Sea, which until then had been an internal “Ottoman lake” (Kołodziejczyk 2007).

Throughout the nineteenth century, Russia succeeded in its southward expansion, bringing the northern and eastern seashores of the Caspian and Black Seas under its control. Via the occupation of the Kars region in Ottoman Anatolia, Russia penetrated south of the Black Sea. During World War I, Russian military conducted warfare on the Gallipoli peninsula and in other parts of the Ottoman lands, in the proximity of the Ottoman capital. On the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, the Russians projected an unprecedented military presence in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea region. The revolution radically changed the situation. However, Soviet Russia was able to re-occupy vast, formerly Tsarist-ruled territories in 1919–1921. Moscow reintegrated the Caucasus, Central Asia and Ukraine as well as the Crimean peninsula into its territory, and it forged close cooperation with Turkey, assisting Mustafa Kemal’s national movement in its struggle against British, French, Italian and Greek forces.

As a superpower, the Soviet Union overestimated its potential in the Balkans and in the Middle East. In 1941, the USSR occupied the northern part of Iran. During the final stage of World War II in 1944–1945, Moscow made territorial claims within Turkey and hoped for the political success of the communists in Greece. In 1948, despite its antisemitic propaganda and policy, the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the State of Israel, hoping the newly founded nation would become a pioneer of socialist ideas in the region. But not yet possessing nuclear weapons, Moscow had to accept the dynamics in the interlinked regions where its influence was limited: In December 1946, the Soviet occupation of northern Iran came to an end, and the procommunist puppet states in Iran’s Azerbaijan and Kurdistan provinces were dismantled by Tehran, which became a close ally of the West. Frightened by Soviet territorial claims in Anatolia, Ankara accelerated its efforts to be integrated into NATO—established in 1949—and became a member in 1952. It sent tens of thousands of its soldiers to fight pro-Soviet proxies in Korea. The communists failed to seize power in Athens, and Israel forged a close relationship with its Western allies, particularly the US. Moscow’s only partners remained the fragile postcolonial Arab states in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, then Syria and Iraq.

When Nikita Khrushchev came to power, he rethought the Soviet strategy towards the Eastern Mediterranean and rejected all claims against Turkey. Nonetheless, in 1957 Moscow decided to establish a military presence in the Mediterranean. The so-called Fifth Mediterranean Navy Squadron (Piataia Sredizemnomorskaia Eskadra Korablei Voenno-Morskogo Flota) was officially stationed in July 1967 (Mashchenko 2018), and the Soviet Union began to adopt an ambiguous policy of directly supporting prosocialist countries in the region and closely observing the dynamics within the pro-Western alliances. Backing the communist parties across the world, Moscow invested in modernization and infrastructure projects in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The Soviets trained local militaries, awarded scholarships for study at its secondary schools and universities, built up expertise about the region and waited for decentralizing trends to advance within the pro-Western alliances, or at least for relations among those alliances’ key members to deteriorate. Observing the Turkish–Greek antagonism due to disputed Cyprus, Moscow boosted its cooperation with Ankara in the mid-1960s.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union could boast of several large-scale modernization projects that had successfully been realized across the Greater Middle East, including the Aswan Dam and the Polytechnical University of Kabul. Tens of thousands of Soviet specialists, military personnel, engineers and spymasters worked in the region. In addition to the Soviet squadron in the Mediterranean Sea, Moscow established a military base on Syrian territory along the Mediterranean. Ruled by Hafiz Assad, the father of Syria’s current president, Syria became Moscow’s most credible partner in the region, while Egypt, Turkey, even Iraq and other countries demonstrated greater resilience towards the Soviet Union. Tartus on the Syrian Mediterranean coast is one of Moscow’s oldest military bases outside formerly Soviet territory: “Under a 1971 deal with Syria, Russia has leased the Tartus facility as part of a multi-billion-dollar debt write-off” (Gardner 2012).

The base had been designed as a delivery and restoration centre for technical support for the military vessels stationed in the Mediterranean. Before Tartus the Soviet navy had routinely travelled in and out of the Mediterranean and could call on the Egyptian port of Alexandria as well as certain ports in Albania and Cyprus. However, deterioration of ideological ties between Tirana and Moscow hindered their closer cooperation, and the rapprochement between Ankara and Moscow made Cyprus reluctant to host Soviet vessels in its ports. The emergence of Tartus radically changed the situation.

The presence of several Soviet navy vessels cruising the Mediterranean and passing through the Straits under the aegis of the special status accorded to the Soviet Union in the 1936 Montreux Convention was an important precedent for the Soviet military base at Tartus. Backing the Palestinian Liberation Front and the transnational Ba’ath Party as well as maintaining strong contacts with various Kurdish guerrilla groups in the Middle East, Moscow became an important player in the Eastern Mediterranean. The US naval bases in the Spanish city of Rota and in southern Italy were geographically quite remote from the Soviet border; the Soviets were much more concerned by developments in the Eastern Mediterranean than by those in its western part. The establishment of the pro-Marxist Kurdish Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) in 1978 gave Moscow an essential trump card in its multifaceted interaction with NATO member Turkey, which hosted the NATO base of Incirlik, close to the Soviet border along the Black Sea and in the Caucasus.

The collapse of the Warsaw Pact, followed by the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991 exerted a profound impact on the Russian policy towards the Eastern Mediterranean. When Moldova and particularly Ukraine regained independence, Moscow lost control over the northern shore of the Black Sea. Likewise with Georgia and Azerbaijan: when these two republics regained independence in 1991, Russia lost the eastern shore of the Black Sea and a common land border with Turkey and Iran. Moscow’s year-long bargaining over the Black Sea fleet with Ukraine began, and Russia had to make annual payments for its use of the Gabala Radar Station in northern Azerbaijan. In 1992, Russia eliminated the Fifth Mediterranean Squadron, and the personnel at Tartus dwindled. Up to fourteen Russian soldiers served on the Tartus base, which became chronically underfunded and technically out of use.

Russia’s steady comeback into the Eastern Mediterranean started after Vladimir Putin came to power. The orientalist and spymaster Evgenii Primakov (1929–2015) was an important early figure in this regard. Trained in Arab studies, Primakov worked undercover for years in Egypt and other Arab countries. In the 1990s, he held various high-ranking positions, heading the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Foreign Intelligence Service before becoming Russia’s prime minister in 1998. Primakov condemned the NATO military operation against Moscow’s traditional ally Serbia and pleaded that Russia mount a comeback on the international stage, including in the Middle East, which he felt particularly affiliated with.

Vladimir Putin’s first presidency was marked by his forced reintegration into Russia of the breakaway region of Chechnia and by the further consolidation of the country’s authoritarian regime. Combatting pro-Western political opposition within Russia itself, Putin forged ties with right-wing groups of Eurasianists and neo-communists alike and promoted an ideological amalgam marked by a distinct neo-imperialism. Condemning the fall of the Soviet Union, Putin advanced the idea of an efficient and strong Russian nation-state, able to protect its interests in the post-Soviet space, the “near abroad” (blizhnee zarubezh‘e), as well as internationally. Preoccupied with the modernization of its military forces and with internal separatism in the northern Caucasus, Moscow failed to prevent the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004–2005. In 2004, a group of East European countries, formerly socialist, became NATO members. While the relations with the US steadily deteriorated, Putin condemned the West’s promotion of democracy and human rights and took rhetorical aim at the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU. Putin highlighted these issues in his speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Rejecting the alleged unipolar, US-dominated, post-1991 world, Putin swore that Russia would resist it (Arbatov 2007). After the Georgian–Russian War in 2008, Moscow accelerated its large-scale modernization of its military arsenal, intensified bilateral relations with Turkey and planned to bring Tartus, its single military base outside former Soviet territory, up to date. With the arrival of the Arab Spring in 2010–2011, Russia decided to restore its multifaceted military presence in the Mediterranean.

Flexibility

International scholars have concentrated on two cardinal dates when analysing the Russian comeback in the region, namely the re-establishment of its naval presence in 2013 (Mashchenko 2018) and the aerial attacks in support of president Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian war in 2015 (Siddi 2020). However, it is necessary to look at the broader context. Flexibility is a key notion for understanding Russian Eastern Mediterranean policy, a quality one sees reflected in the multifaceted and unideological relationships developed by Moscow with all the Mediterranean states, key regional powers and non-governmental actors. Here Moscow has used both its state and non-state infrastructure, such as paramilitary groups and the country’s internet companies.

Now absent ideological bias, Moscow has demonstrated flexibility by developing close economic cooperation and strong lines of political dialogue with EU democracies such as France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. Interwoven into numerous economic projects in energy, tourism and direct investment sectors, Moscow has maintained close contact both with ruling parties as well as other, mostly rightest parties. Russia supports the main French opposition party, the Front National, and overtly sympathizes with its leader Marine Le Pen even as it cooperates closely with the French government of Emmanuel Macron. In Libya, it backs the military forces led by field marshal Khalifa Haftar, a Soviet-era graduate of the former M. V. Frunze Military Academy. Moscow and Rome possess a multifaceted relationship (Harlan and Pitrelli 2019).

In the Greek case, former prime minister Alexis Tsipras even became an arduous advocate of Russia within the EU, insisting that anti-Russian sanctions be lifted (Greece’s Tsipras Condemns Sanctions, BBC News, 28 May 2016; Triana 2017). Despite Greece’s poor economic performance and its deep and prolonged crisis, Moscow became an important economic player both here and, in particular, in Cyprus. Although Moscow lacks the means to pull the Greek and Cypriot economies out of crisis, Russian investors nonetheless remain important stakeholders in their internal markets (Stronski 2021).

In fact, Russia never intended to solve any country’s economic woes but rather meant only to create the potential for the projection of its own power. Here the Kremlin’s strategy incontrovertibly succeeded. One important element of Russia foreign policy’s flexibility is its readiness to enter into dialogue with all kind of political actors, since either in a short- or a long-term perspective such collaborations might turn out to align with the Russian agenda. Russia, perceiving NATO to be its adversary, tries to combat the alliance’s structures by all available diplomatic, ideological and informational means. For a decade it has cultivated the idea of hybrid warfare.

Hybridity is in fact another essential element of Russia’s flexibility when pursuing its Eastern Mediterranean strategy. Its multilingual television and internet news and information projects Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik are strongly represented across the region. Sputnik Turkey became one of Turkey’s most important news sources. Additionally, Russia successfully expanded its internet services into the region. The Turkish co-enterprise yandex.com.tr, derived from the Russian yandex.ru, dominates Turkish internet search engines. The same goes, although to a smaller extent, for the Arab societies of the Eastern Mediterranean. It is noteworthy that RT Arabic provides information about political, economic and cultural developments in Russia as well as broadcasting overt anti-Western propaganda, deepening anti-Western scepticism in those countries. The third, and more crucial, element of flexibility is Russia’s ability to cause and to help shape new dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean, and then profit from the damage done to Western interests there.

Dynamics

It had been more difficult for the Soviet Union to launch initiatives in the Eastern Mediterranean; instead, it tried to react to Western projects in a limited fashion. The Fifth Mediterranean Squadron in the 1950s was typical in this regard: a costly military build-up of the Soviet navy meant to counterbalance the presence of the US Sixth Army. The Soviet naval footprint was based on a rotation of ships and personnel, and vessels from the Baltics, Black Sea and elsewhere regularly entered the Mediterranean. Until the establishment of the Tartus base, these sorts of operations took place under less than ideal circumstances because of the relatively warm climate and the Soviet inability to adapt its submarines. Repairs required the vessels to head towards the Soviet Black Sea coast. While the Tartus base improved the everyday functioning of the Soviet navy, the Soviet military mission in the Mediterranean remained officially a part of the Soviet Black Sea fleet. It is questionable whether its military potential could be compared to NATO’s regional infrastructure, even setting aside the Western Mediterranean (i.e. the NATO presence in the Spanish town of Rota). What has changed is that Russia has now adopted a more sophisticated strategy and possesses a novel ability to determine and influence regional and international dynamics. It achieves more by investing less.

Understanding recent Russian policy in the Eastern Mediterranean entails rethinking the allegedly deep-rooted antagonism between NATO members and Russia, which should be read much more within the context of bilateral relations between Russia and different NATO members, as well as within regional and international dynamics. While the political relations on the organizational level between Brussels and Moscow seem to have been heavily damaged and remain strained, Russia and West and South European countries have embarked on a path of profound cooperation. Under Putin, Russia has tried to develop strategic relations with various NATO members, creating certain asymmetries in NATO policy towards Russia. With regard to the Eastern Mediterranean, Moscow concentrated on France, Italy, Greece and Turkey in pursuit of a long-term strategy that seems to be efficient. In the following, I focus on the Russian strategy towards Turkey and Syria, regarding the gas conflict in the region as a part of the bilateral relations of Russia’s key partners, and I demonstrate why and how these dynamics are interwoven and are crucial for the Eastern Mediterranean. These dynamics improve Russia’s geopolitical standing vis-à-vis the EU and the US as well as its perception among the local players and regional powers.

Turkey

Turkey, among NATO’s oldest members, has the second strongest army in the alliance. During the Cold War, it played the bulwark role within the Western security mosaic in the Mediterranean. After the fall of the USSR, Ankara profoundly deepened its relations with the Turkic republic of Azerbaijan and Central Asia, and indirectly backed the Chechen national movement in the early 1990s. Chechen activists travelled to Turkey for medical treatment, and Ankara closely cooperated with the Crimean Tatar movement for autonomy and with Ukraine and Georgia in the Black Sea region. Closely interwoven with the US at that time, Ankara supported pro-Western alliance-building in the post-Soviet space, for example with regard to Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova (GUAM). Russia entirely rethought its previous strategy towards Turkey and sought to develop bilateral relations in the technology and energy fields, attentively observing the evolution of US–Turkish relations as well as the stagnation in Turkey’s bid for EU membership. Ankara diminished its support for the Chechen cause, and between 2009 and 2011 four Chechen political activists in exile were killed in Istanbul. Turkish and international media outlets speculated on the involvement of Russian intelligence in these political murders (Seibert 2014). Turkish–Russian rapprochement was in the interest of both sides, and several long-term projects were launched in the early 2010s. Initially looking to attract energy supplies and tourists from Russia, Ankara hoped that there would be more opportunities for the country’s growing construction and textile sectors on the Russian market. With growing economic interaction between the two nations, Moscow profited from the steady aggravation of relations between Turkey and its key NATO partner, the US, as well as from regional dynamics which provoked further distrust between Washington and Ankara.

The Soviet Union had supported Kurdish Marxist groups throughout the Middle East, particularly in Turkey and in Iran, and even during World War II. Refusing to recognize the PKK as a terrorist organisation, as Turkey and (since 2002) the EU have, Russia currently maintains contacts with Kurdish political and military organizations in Turkey, Syria and even in Iraq, and Moscow is even home to their semi-official representational offices. At the same time, Russia feels disturbed by the strong pro-American mood among Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq and among the Syrian Kurdish People’s Defence Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG). The “flexible” changes of the Russian standpoint, refusing to side with the Kurds, aligns with the Turkish agenda as well as those of Syria and Iran and makes Russia an extremely important partner. When the US rejected supplying Turkey with Patriot missiles to secure the latter’s borders, Russia became an essential alternative, and it offered Turkey its S-400 antimissile protection system—which Turkey bought despite having condemned, in alarmed tones, the Greek Cyprian government’s purchase of the S-300 model at the end of the 1990s. In 1998, Cyprus’s purchase of Russian military technology (Triana 2017) was, however, resolved by “not installing” it. Additionally, Cyprus is not a member of NATO. At that time Turkey had argued that the S-300, deployed in proximity to its borders, posed a direct threat; twenty years later, tough criticism from Washington and Brussels notwithstanding, Turkey itself purchased an updated version of the system. Through a process of sustainable rapprochement towards Turkey, Russia thus has not caused but has heavily contributed to a deepening of US–Turkish tensions. And yet not only the development of Russian–Turkish energy cooperation, reflected in the Turkish Stream (now TurkStream) project and the Russian construction of Turkey’s first nuclear plant in the eastern Anatolian town of Akkuyu, or even the aforementioned purchase of the S-400 antimissile protection system, demonstrates Moscow’s ability to integrate Turkey into its new regional alliances strategy. There are other dynamics at work in the region as well. The best examples in this regard are the Russian military operations in Syria since 2015 and the political regulation of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh in the fall of 2020.

Syria

Russia has maintained close ties with Syria for decades, and hundreds of high-ranking Syrian military and security personnel and intelligence officers were trained in the Soviet Union and are fluent in Russian. However, Russia radically changed the status quo in 2015 through its entry into the Syrian civil war, siding with the internationally criticized government of Bashar al-Assad. In accordance with a bilateral agreement made with the Syrian government, Moscow radically modernized its material-technical support facilities in Tartus. It is worth mentioning that the port city of Tartus is situated 25 kilometres from the Syrian–Lebanese border and that Russia can thus hypothetically rapidly deploy its vessels and troops to neighbouring Lebanon in an emergency situation. The Lebanese–Armenian political activist Yeghia Tashjian wrote in The Armenian Weekly that Russia “perceives Lebanon as a part of the Syrian track […]” (Tashjian 2021). Besides Tartus, Russia acquired a second military facility, the base in Hmeimim close to the Syrian capital of Damascus, and has expanded it several times since 2017 (Dettmer 2021). Hmeimim is of importance not only for the military operations in Syria itself; it has been used as a hub for Russian military raids in Africa, particularly in Libya (Mardasov 2020).

Russia backed pro-government forces in Syria with aerial support by bombing directed at both the moderate Syrian opposition and the radical organization Daesh—the Arabic name of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—from its facilities in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and even from the northern Caspian Sea. When intervening in the Syrian civil war, Moscow was perfectly aware of the internal fractions and the presence of Turkish military forces in the borderland region, as well as US troops, Kurdish guerrilla fighters, various Islamists’ brigades, thousands of Iranian military specialists, soldiers from the Quds forces—one of the branches of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which specializes in unconventional warfare and military intelligence operations and reports directly to Ayatolla Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran—and paramilitary groups backing the Assad regime. Maintaining contacts with all players and observing the aggravation of US–Turkish relations due to US–Kurdish cooperation against Turkey in Afrin in northwestern Syria, Moscow overtly backed its ally and the adversary of Ankara, Bashar el-Assad, but it tolerated the Turkish zone of influence in the northern provinces of Syria along the border, all the while deepening its cooperation with Iran “on the ground” and, paradoxically, with Israel as well. In summer 2020, The Arab Weekly reported that since the start of the operation in 2015 “more than 63,000 Russian military personnel” (Russia Expands Hmeimim Air Base, The Arab Weekly, 20 July 2020) had been deployed in Syria. This number seemingly represents the entire breadth of people associated with military engagement, such as Russian military experts, pilots, sailors in Tartus, military doctors, translators, etc. It is highly likely that the stable number of deployed personnel in Hmeimim is around 4,000 people (Ülgen and Kasapoğlu 2021, 4), about the same number of military personnel at the Russian military base in Giumri, close to Armenian capital of Yerevan and in proximity to the Turkish–Armenian border. In addition to the establishment of Russian military bases, Moscow provided Syria with S-300 and ultimately with S-400 antimissile protection systems. Russian intervention and the “Russian-made” militarization of the Syrian autocracy enabled Bashar al-Assad to remain in power: opposition forces along the entire political spectrum were destroyed or at least weakened to a level that will ensure that any potentially serious challenge to the regime is now decades in the future. Russia imposed the continuation of its vassal in power, gained a military base, and marked its comeback to the region, exploiting the Syrian war for the promotion of its new military facilities. That said, it should be mentioned that Moscow integrated Turkey and Iran, two other important buyers of Russian antimissile defence systems, into the complex negotiations about ending the war and Syria’s future that took place in Geneva, Astana and finally Sochi.

In 2016, the second year of Russian intervention in the war in Syria, an attempted military coup occurred in Turkey. Despite strained relations between the two countries after Turkey had shot down a Russian military airplane over the Syrian–Turkish border, Moscow immediately offered the Turkish government intelligence support. Post-coup political developments at once deepened the cleavages between Ankara and the US and opened up new vistas in Russian–Turkish cooperation. Russian warfare in Syria, its random bombing of urban spaces, caused a large-scale exodus of civilians from Syria to Turkey and to EU countries. This dynamic meant that Russia now had new means of leverage with Turkey and the EU, as did Turkey with regard to the EU.

The Gas Conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean

Russia is the most important gas provider for the European Union and for Turkey. Thus, Moscow is hardly pleased with the idea that its importance in this domain, both for the EU and Turkey, could be diminished by the projected EastMed pipeline. Observing with great attention the alliance-building on the one hand among Israel, Greece, Cyprus and Egypt, and on the other hand between Turkey and the internationally recognized government of Libya, Moscow hopes that the status quo is maintained regarding the disputed, unresolved situation of the Eastern Mediterranean gas fields. The energy experts Sang Yoon Shin and Taehwan Kim correctly observe that “if European countries import gas from the Eastern Mediterranean region, they can diversify their sources and decrease their dependence on Russia. Furthermore, the fact that they have other available sources can enhance their bargaining power over Russia” (Shin and Kim 2021, 145). Until now, applying its mixed strategy reliant upon a combination of soft and hard power methods, Russia has been able to forestall, and ultimately disrupt, energy supply projects such as the Nabucco and the Turkmen gas pipelines that had been intended to provide the EU with energy by means that would circumvent Russia. Moscow, observing Italy and particularly France siding with Greece and Cyprus in the conflict with Turkey, explained their support as stemming from the economic profits of the French company Total and the Italian firm Eni in the region, rather than from any kind of values-related EU solidarity (Martsinkevich 2017; Gasiuk 2019; Alekseenkova 2020). In May 2019, Russian analyst Alexander Gasiuk even reported French plans to establish military bases on Cyprus to back Total’s activity and to hinder the dismantling of Eni’s drilling facilities, which the Turks had demanded (Gasiuk 2019).

EastMed, however, if it became operational, would not satisfy the energy demands of the entire EU. It would have an effect on Russia, which has also been concerned over the intensive discussions within the EU about alternative energy sources as well as over the latter’s efforts to diversify its energy policy with an eye to the markets in East and Southeast Asia. Therefore, Russia is interested in the preservation of conflict and tension among Greece, France and Turkey, NATO members all, as well as among Israel, Egypt and Turkey, so that any kind of alliance-building is stymied. In fact, the situation, riven as it is by conflict, poisons the relations between Greece and Turkey and between France and Turkey, and in so doing it jeopardizes NATO’s internal firmness and the solidarity of its members.

Observing the present contradictions between the Mediterranean countries over the as yet untapped gas fields, significant actors in the Russian economy asserted themselves in deals over gas and oil drilling in Syria and Lebanon. In 2017, the Russian enterprise Novatek joined a consortium, along with Total and Eni, on the Lebanese coast. Novatek possesses 20% of the Total-led consortium, offering Moscow new possibilities of cooperation with two important EU member states and Mediterranean countries, thus forging interdependency. Additionally, in Lebanon, the Russian state oil company Rosneft set up the affiliated local firm Levante Storage S.A.R.L in 2020 “for oil product storage” (Rosneft Sets Up Oil Product Storage, Interfax, 27 May 2020). And in 2021 two other Russian companies, Capital Limited and East Med Amrit, started oil and gas sondage along the Syrian coast, referring to an agreement signed by them with the Syrian government in 2013 (Iuzik 2021). The Arab Weekly wrote in April 2021 that this step by Russia “is likely to cause a major disruption of relations in the region, not least because the area in which Russian companies are being allowed to operate is disputed by the Lebanese” (Russian East Med Ambitions, The Arab Weekly, 2 April 2021).

The Karabakh War of 2020

Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have repeatedly clashed over the latter’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, are not adjacent to the Mediterranean; however, the developments there are closely intertwined with the latter region. Israel and Turkey maintain relations of strategic cooperation with Azerbaijan, while Iran has been closely linked to Armenia through economic and energy ties. Shortly after the outbreak of military action between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in September 2020, Greece overtly expressed solidarity with Armenia, which for its part withdrew its ambassador from Israel. Russia has a military base with 4,000 personnel located close to Armenia’s capital Yerevan, and both countries are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (Organizatsiia dogovora kollektivnoi bezopasnosti, ODKB). Disturbed by pro-Western tendencies in Armenian politics and the country’s rapprochement with the EU, Moscow has deepened its large-scale cooperation with Azerbaijan in recent years. Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have purchased military equipment from Russia and have conducted joint military exercises together, although Azerbaijan is not a member of the ODKB. Having trained with Turkish and Israeli assistance and purchased high-tech drones, the Azerbaijani army was able to retake control over areas north, east and south of Karabakh, as well as the town of Shusha in Karabakh, during clashes in September–November 2020. This war was the most severe escalation of the conflict since the ceasefire of May 1994, when the so-called Minsk Group of the OSCE backed and oversaw the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Three co-chairs—the US, France and Russia—were appointed to the Minsk Group, and the diplomats from these three countries organized numerous meetings bringing together the presidents and ministers of foreign affairs of both countries. In recent years, however, the activity of the Minsk Group left much to be desired, and ultimately it was doomed. Taking all this into consideration, and taking advantage of the post-election turmoil in the US, Moscow brokered a trilateral ceasefire agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan on 11 November 2020. On its eve, Moscow maintained direct contact with other regional powers such as Iran and particularly Turkey, opening up a new vista of cooperation to complement the existing cooperative platform with Syria and Libya. At the same time, Moscow appeased Azerbaijan via the deployment of nearly 2,000 peacekeepers to the region of Karabakh, which at the time the Azerbaijani army could not control. Turkey and Russia jointly established a common Russian–Turkish Monitoring Centre on the territory, which in subsequent months came under the control of the Azerbaijani army. By sending peacekeepers to Karabakh for a five-year term, Russia acquired a military presence in Azerbaijan while forging cooperative ties with Ankara. This trilateral context of the Russian–Armenian–Azerbaijani agreement in November 2020 radically diminished the role of the Minsk Group, particularly the part played by the US and France.

The Eastern Mediterranean is but one of several fields where one sees Russian diplomacy aiming to stir up dissent within the transatlantic security community. Russian foreign policy seeks to weaken the organizational, military and other infrastructure of NATO, perceiving its activities, and especially its eastward expansion, as a direct menace to Russian national security and geopolitical interests in the “near abroad” former Soviet republics. Hindering Georgia’s and Ukraine’s integration into NATO is of paramount importance for Russia. The Kremlin’s policy towards the Eastern Mediterranean demonstrates unusual flexibility in order to generate, provoke, co-shape and influence regional and international dynamics and to pursue its interests. Along with a high level of expertise, Russia inherited from the Soviet period its network in the Arab coastal states of the Mediterranean, encompassing Libya, Egypt, Lebanon and particularly Syria; but it has rejected adopting any ideological bias in the shaping of its new strategy. In its use of soft and hard power the Kremlin’s approach is very pragmatic, demonstrating a sophisticated ability to provoke and to use divergences in opinion among NATO members, as well as various regional powers. The Eastern Mediterranean became an important arena for Russian power leverage in its relations with NATO in general and with the US in particular. The Russian analyst Prokhor Tebin speculated in 2018 that Russia could set up a “permanent presence of Russian Navy in the Red Sea, in the Persian Gulf and in the Gulf of Aden as well as in the western part of the Arabian Sea” (Tebin 2018) at some point in the future.

Analyzing Russia’s Mediterranean policy in 2018, Borchevskaya and Eljarh reflected:

“Simply by being there when the US was absent, Moscow was able to project power. To be sure, the Russian navy still has major problems and lags far behind the country’s aviation capabilities, but in Syria it provides a clear example of how the Kremlin played a weak hand well, while the West had a strong hand but played it poorly.” (Borchevskaya and Eljarh 2018, 4)

Indeed, not only did Russia prove itself able to “play a weak hand well”, but the Western security community committed numerous miscalculations and faults. Through its flexibility and its potential to shape certain dynamics on the regional and international levels, Russia was able not only to profit from its Soviet legacy but also to strengthen its positions throughout the region.

The chaotic withdrawal of NATO and US troops from Afghanistan and the unprecedentedly quick re-occupation of the entire country by the Taliban in August 2021 damaged the image of the West and triggered a new wave of migrants to Turkey, and via Turkey to the European Union. These circumstances open up new vistas for Russia, which on the one hand has been maintaining a political dialogue with the Taliban in Afghanistan and on the other conducted military drills jointly with the post-Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in July 2021.

The Russian Intervention into Ukraine 2022

On 24 February 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine through a series of aerial strikes, launched simultaneously from different directions. These aerial strikes were supported by ground operations in eastern and northern Ukraine. The intervention started a month and a half after the Russia-led suppression of unrest in Kazakhstan, where Russia deployed troops to Kazakh cities in close cooperation with its ODKB allies of Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Russian president Vladimir Putin orchestrated all this bellicose activity as a collectively launched measure and instrumentalized it to demonstrate the ability of a Russian-dominated post-Soviet military bloc to interact quickly and efficiently in its own “backyard”. In the case of the assault against Ukraine, Moscow engaged its close ally Belarus in particular, using the latter’s territory as a staging ground to invade the country from the north. In response, major Western countries announced large-scale sanctions aimed at weakening Russia’s oil- and gas-dependent economy and thereby indirectly its ability to revitalize its aerial and military capabilities. At the same time, many NATO member states have supported Ukraine financially as well as militarily. While most NATO countries provided Ukraine with defensive weaponry, Turkey has sold Bayraktar combat drones to Kyiv since 2019 (Falk 2022). Ankara condemned the war and sent Ukraine humanitarian aid but, along with Israel, Georgia and Azerbaijan, it did not join the anti-Russian sanctions. As things currently stand, the question posed by the high-ranking Turkish diplomat Selim Yenel (2022)—“Can Russia’s war on Ukraine drive Turkey and the West to reconcile?”—seems to warrant an answer in the affirmative. However, Russia will try to sabotage this rapprochement. According to the Turkish political scientist Visne Korkmaz, “Russia and Turkey developed a model of damage control through high-level dialogue, compartmentalization of issues, and keeping cooperation intact” (Korkmaz 2022).

Russia has been severely challenged by the economic sanctions imposed by the EU, the US, Canada and Japan. However, in the Eastern Mediterranean the dynamics remain very complex, and Moscow will doubtless continue to assert itself within the region’s zones of cleavage. The interaction between Russia and Turkey as well as Israel has become even more intensive. Both of the latter countries also have close ties to Kyiv. They not only could not be compelled to impose anti-Russian sanctions but positioned themselves as active intermediaries between Kyiv and Moscow. In March, Turkey hosted two meetings of Ukrainian and Russian negotiators in Antalya and then in Istanbul. In parallel to the Turkish efforts, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett met Russian president Putin, and also spoke repeatedly with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky via telephone.

Lebanon reflects the most controversial dynamics in its region with regard to its reaction to the Russian–Ukrainian war. While the Lebanese government condemned the Russian attack and backed the UN’s anti-Russia resolution, the radical Shi’a Hizbollah leaders took the Russian side. These cleavages are characteristic given the country’s confessional map: Though the Maronite patriarch and the Sunni mufti condemned the Russian aggression, the Greek Orthodox clergy has kept silent.

The Syrian leadership fully supports Moscow and even praises the invasion (Correction of History, Aljazeera, 25 February 2022). Damascus voted against the UN resolution and allowed Russia to recruit young unemployed Syrians to fight for the Russian cause in Ukraine. Syrian mercenaries have seemingly been joined on the ground in Ukraine by Lebanese Hizbollah members and experienced Russian fighters of the so-called Private Military Company Wagner, or Wagner Group. This paramilitary organization, which officially does not exist but has been labelled the de facto private army of Vladimir Putin, has been operating in many African states, particularly in Libya and Sudan, as well as in Ukraine since at least 2014.

It is probable that if the Ukrainian–Russian negotiations go nowhere and the war continues, Moscow will relocate Wagner mercenaries from Libya and other countries of the Mediterranean basin to Ukraine, and it may even redeploy its regular military units based in the Russian military bases in the region. Theoretically, the Russian aggression against Ukraine could reduce the number of Russian military personnel in Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan’s and Georgia’s breakaway provinces. To do so might unleash other dynamics, as the most recent flare-up in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan demonstrated. The necessity of setting strategic military priorities will challenge Russia.

Moscow will encourage sanctions-busting and embrace countries that did not join the Western sanctions programme, making Russia more dependent on such countries (Macaron 2022) and forging closer ties with them. Russia will even more intensively try to deepen cleavages between NATO members and other countries of the Eastern Mediterranean. Equipped with a sophisticated propaganda machinery, the Russian establishment will aim to weaken the current shock-induced unity among NATO and EU members with regard to Ukraine and the broad solidarity with Ukrainians expressed in Europe. It is worth mentioning that while the Kremlin’s propaganda outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik were banned in the EU and US, they continue to spread fake news around the Eastern Mediterranean. Assuming that the warfare continues for an extended period, the number of Ukrainian refugees could double or even triple, which would severely challenge the health, education and social systems of even the richer EU member states in the current pandemic era. Russia has the leverage to orchestrate this new refugee crisis and by doing so will aim at vitalizing its allied far-right parties and social movements across Europe, as it did in the aftermath of the refugee crisis of 2015.

For the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, Ukraine and Russia were the main providers of wheat, corn and other grains. The cessation or even only the disruption of wheat provisions has already caused shortages and hunger in North African countries as well as in the rest of the Middle East; the aggravated economic situation will spread poverty more widely and could lead to severe social unrest, which in turn could trigger additional migratory waves directed towards the EU. Italy, Greece and Cyprus feel challenged by this prospect in a particular way. At the end of March, the Russian fleet stopped dozens of Ukrainian and international ships loaded with agricultural produce as they made their way towards the Mediterranean to make deliveries. Russia will try to use this strategy in the future as a form of leverage and as a way to monopolize the grain market. One currently observes something analogous in the domain of education, for example when Russia offers scholarships to Lebanese students evacuated from Ukraine to continue their education in Russia.

The Russian war against Ukraine strengthened Russian ties with Iran. Tehran, particularly the hawkish and conservative part of the establishment there, sides with Moscow. Being part of the international diplomatic framework negotiating the status of Iran’s nuclear program, Russia would try to control any rapprochement between Tehran and the West. Furthermore, Moscow is eager to back pro-Iranian and pro-Assad Shi’a militias across the Middle East to combat the US and its oil-rich partners like Saudi Arabia and, to some extent, its key security allies, like Israel. The same goes for the Caucasus. The destabilization in the Greater Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean would jeopardize Europe’s energy supply and prolong Western dependencies on Russian oil and gas. In this context, Israel and Turkey’s rapprochement, particularly with regard to gas transportation from Israel’s Leviathan offshore gas field, is of great concern to Moscow.

Conclusion

Bound by their strategic, economic and geopolitical interests, Egypt, Turkey, and Israel did not join the anti-Russian sanctions regime, and neither did China, India and many countries in Latin America and Africa. On 30 March 2022, Russia’s deputy minister of foreign affairs Sergei Riabkov declared that the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will be the core of the future world order (Kondrat’eva 2022). In boosting its interaction with these countries, Russia will try to deepen the distance between the so-called Russia-friendly and non-friendly EU member states in the Eastern Mediterranean, and to this end it will pursue a more aggressive, hard power foreign policy towards the region. With regard to the relatively weaker economies of the Eastern Mediterranean, Russia will position itself as a tourist mecca and a grain importer. Egypt and Turkey might be interested in Russia’s hypersonic missile facilities, whose power has been demonstrated via a Russian strike on a weapons’ depot in western Ukraine. If one takes a long-term perspective, one can imagine Russia attracting countries such as Syria, Iran and Egypt to join the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Additionally, Moscow will attempt to hinder alternative supply itineraries of oil and gas to the EU by stirring up local conflicts, using irregular proxies like the Wagner Group and close allies like the Lebanese Hizbollah and pro-Assad Syrian fighters.

The Western alliance and the EU, it is worth noting, should back strategic cooperation among the non-EU countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly among Israel, Turkey and Egypt, to prevent Russia from exerting its influence on them in terms of security. When it comes to Southeastern Europe, Israeli–Turkish cooperation in the Leviathan gas field could prove a key measure on the way to overcoming dependency on Russian gas. At the same time, the EU should impose sanctions on high-ranking Russian military officials deployed on the Russian military bases in Syria and in the post-Soviet republics as well as on the military infrastructure of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, especially given the severely blurred boundaries between the Russian regular army and its paramilitary proxies.