Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and Russian President Vladimir Putin have pledged to deepen relations between their two countries after holding talks in St. Petersburg yesterday. Meeting on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which Prabowo will attend today, the pair signed a “declaration on strategic partnership” and hailed the recent advances in relations.
In a statement after the talks at the Konstantin Palace, Prabowo said that the relationship between the two countries was “getting stronger again,” the AFP news agency reported.
“My meeting with President Putin today was intense, warm, and productive. In all fields of economics, technical cooperation, trade, investment, agriculture – they all have experienced significant improvements.” Prabowo also expressed his “deep gratitude” to Russia for supporting Indonesia’s accession to the BRICS grouping in January.
During the meeting, Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund Danantara Indonesia and the Russian Direct Investment Fund also signed an agreement to create an investment fund worth $2.29 billion.
It is unclear exactly what the “declaration on strategic partnership” signed by the two leaders means. According to TASS, Kremlin Aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters earlier this week that “relations are developing in a fairly constructive manner,” and that the two leaders wished to “enshrine all of this in writing.”
It is clear that both leaders are enthusiastic about the potential of their relationship. “Our relations with Indonesia are developing steadily. Trade turnover is growing. We have good prospects in a number of promising and very interesting areas of cooperation,” Putin said, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. “This includes agriculture, space, and energy, as well as military-technical cooperation. Our interaction is very great, and it is growing.”
Russia’s bid for closer defense, economic, and nuclear relations with Indonesia is a clear attempt to strengthen its influence in the Global South and reduce the effectiveness of Western efforts to isolate the country since its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. For Indonesia, a closer relationship with Russia is an important component of Prabowo’s policy of assertive non-alignment, which seeks improved relations with nations of all persuasions, all the better to reduce its reliance on any one of them.
Despite the Ukraine invasion, Indonesia’s leader clearly views Russia as an important complement to Indonesia’s relationships with China, the United States, Japan, Australia, and the Gulf states. Prabowo traveled to Russia five times as defense minister between 2019 and 2024. The most recent trip came in July of last year, two months prior to his inauguration, when he told Putin that he regarded Russia as a “great friend” of Indonesia.
During that trip, the pair discussed the possibility of boosting economic ties, including via a free trade agreement between Indonesia and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union. Putin said that Russia was ready to “further scale up supplies of agricultural products, implement investment projects in the field of energy, transport, and infrastructure.” Last November, the two nations also held their first ever joint military drills in the Java Sea. In April, Janes reported that Russian aerospace forces had requested access to an air force base in West Papua, although Indonesia rejected the report as “simply not true.”
The evolving relation also appears to be cemented by an ideological, even personal, affinity between Prabowo and Putin, who are of a similar age and hail from a similar military-security milieu. The Indonesian leader noted yesterday that on “many issues on the global agenda,” Indonesia and Russia “align in their views,” TASS reported. Both nations champion “the sovereignty of each state, advocate for peaceful solutions to conflicts, and emphasize resolving disputes through cooperation rather than confrontation,” in the news agency’s paraphrase.
Earlier this week, Foreign Minister Sugiono told reporters that the trip was a sign of “how important and strategically Indonesia thinks of its relationship with Russia,” Reuters reported. He suggested that Putin and Prabowo had “chemistry” and suggested they develop and deepen their ties “into a strategic partnership.”
