Min Aung Hlaing, Sergei Shoigu and Nikolai Patrushev (Images: Wikicommons)

A fresh strategic headache has emerged for the Morrison government and its allies in the Indo-Pacific, with Russia making its presence felt in South-East Asia as it becomes increasingly cosy with the Myanmar junta.

Russia has been the generals’ most unqualified supporter since the February 1 coup d’etat and the relationship went to the next level when Myanmar chairman General Min Aung Hlaing recently flew to Moscow for an international military conference.

In his sixth visit since taking over the top job in Myanmar’s military, which is known as the Tatmadaw, he met with Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, who visited Myanmar last year, and Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council.

“We will create a new partnership, [and] will expand it. From the outset, our [military] cooperation was designed so that it would expand over time. That is why during that meeting, we were mostly discussing expanding the existing cooperation,” Min Aung Hlaing said following his trip.

A less-qualified relationship

While Moscow’s support for the junta has fallen short of a “full embrace” — Min Aung Hlaing was not afforded full head-of-state honours, according to reports — it is far less qualified than that from the country’s other big supporters China and India.

Russian arms sales to Myanmar — particularly in air power — have increased over the past decade as leaders in the capital Nay Pyi Taw have moved to decrease the country’s reliance on military equipment from China, its major supplier.

While Russia and China have joined to block any action by the United Nations Security Council against the coup’s leaders, China has continuing concerns about the increased instability it has bought to a country on its southern border and with which it is building a transport and energy corridor through to the Indian Ocean.

“The fast emergence of these militias, and their capacity to evolve from loosely coordinated groups of local people into more structured, better armed and sustainably funded forces, likely marks a new phase of Myanmar’s decades-old civil war,” the International Crisis Group warned in a June 28 report.

Russia’s presence in South-East Asia has been more subtle since it closed its naval base in the Vietnamese deep water port Cam Ranh Bay on the South China Sea in the early 2000s — one of the last relics of the Cold War.

Since then its presence in the region has not been “in your face” but nonetheless has remained quietly significant. Russia has very large diplomatic missions in all the major nations of the region: Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and especially Vietnam, as well as in communist Laos and authoritarian Cambodia.

Strategic partner

Russia joined the East Asia Summit in 2011 and the relationship between Russia and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) was raised to the level of a strategic partnership in 2018, with the bilateral engagement of Russia in the region also accelerating.

Russia has also continued to work assiduously in cultivating its friendships, continuing its long history of providing education to people from most countries in the region, including countries of the former Indochina — Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — but also, in particular, Indonesia.

And while it is the No. 2 arms exporter in the world after the US, it is the biggest arms exporter to the region where an escalating arms race has been taking place in recent years, largely due to the growing military might of China. Arms sales in South-East Asia increased by 5.7% against a global rise of 26%.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Russian arms sales to South-East Asia between 2010 and 2017 were US$6.6 billion, as much as the US and China combined. Since 2000, Russia has accounted for 25% of major arms sales in South-East Asia. Vietnam, Myanmar and Indonesia are Russia’s largest customers, as well as Laos and Malaysia.

For the increasingly authoritarian region, Russia offers better-priced weapons, other blandishments such as soft loans, state-backed credits and barter deals, and crucially doesn’t tie its sales to human rights — unlike its main arms rival the US.

Nowhere in the region right now is this more pertinent than Myanmar, where the junta is using Russian guns and bullets to murder its own citizens.

Analysts are expecting to see an increase in military exercises between Russia and Myanmar as well as increased Russian naval visits, allowing Moscow to increase its Indian Ocean presence.

In this way Russia’s presence — and its problem for Canberra — extends even beyond its longstanding alliance with Vietnam and opportunistic support for the Myanmar junta. It also poses something of a fly in the strategic ointment of the so-called Quad alliance (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) of the US, Japan, Australia and India. Russia is already the major arms supplier to India — considered the Quad’s weakest link — which is its single biggest customer, buying 23% of Russian arms between 2016 and 2020 according to SIPRI.

Simply put, the great power-plays in the Indo-Pacific have just become a bit more complicated.