By Zachary Keck
Russia’s Middle East policy is all the rage these days.
An article in the Washington Post on Tuesday notes what we at The Diplomat have long been discussing: Moscow’s diplomatic offensive in the Middle East region.
The most visible sign of this, of course, is Russia’s policy of protecting the Syrian regime. Along with the diplomatic cover Moscow is providing Bashar al-Assad at the UN Security Council, Vladimir Putin has also established a permanent naval task force in the Mediterranean Sea for the purpose of facilitating Russia’s support for Syria. Russia’s Navy is far from limitless, though, so the ships being deployed to the Mediterranean are coming from Moscow’s other naval regions including the Pacific.
Beyond Syria, Russia’s new beefed up Middle East diplomacy includes more discrete actions. As I noted back in August, when the Egyptian military was in the thick of suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood’s street protests, Putin appeared to “be seizing on the Egyptian crisis and the U.S. response to it to expand Russia’s influence in the Arab world’s most populous country.” According to the Washington Post article, Moscow has been making similar moves in Iraq, another Cold War ally of the Soviet Union.
Read the full story at The Diplomat