Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on Wednesday before hosting the Iranian president in Moscow on Thursday, continuing his return to the international stage despite Western attempts to isolate him.
Vladimir Putin has been treated as a pariah by the West and has been targeted with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over the “deportation” of Ukrainian children. He reserved his rare trips abroad to his closest allies.
For example, he was absent from the last major international meetings: the G20 summit in India in September and the BRICS summit in South Africa in August. Mr. Putin said he avoided these meetings so as not to “cause problems” for the organizers.
With the failure of Ukraine’s major summer counteroffensive on the front lines, the Russian economy absorbing the shock of Western sanctions and international attention focused on Gaza and Israel, Mr. Putin appears more confident.
“Tomorrow there will be working visits by President Putin to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. All this will happen in a single day,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.
According to him, during this visit Mr. Putin will address “bilateral relations,” “the international agenda,” “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” as well as the reductions in oil production within the framework of OPEC+, which includes Russia.
With regard to the war in Gaza, the Russian president has repeatedly expressed criticism of Israel since the beginning of the war with Hamas, denounced the humanitarian “catastrophe” in Gaza and called for the creation of a Palestinian state. A message that he should make clear on this trip to the Arab world.
During a virtual G20 summit on the issue in late November, he accused the West of showing selective outrage by denouncing its offensive in Ukraine and calling on it to “exterminate the civilian population in Palestine.”
On oil, Russia last week announced its intention to increase its production cuts at least until the end of March 2024 to “stabilize prices,” in coordination with Saudi Arabia, a powerful partner within OPEC+, a collective that the most important oil companies unite exporting countries.
The Kremlin has not indicated whether the Russian president will attend COP28, the international climate conference currently taking place in the Emirates.
Iran, China, Central Asia
After his visit to the Middle East, Vladimir Putin will receive Iranian President Ebrahim Raïssi for talks in Russia on Thursday.
“There will be Russian-Iranian talks on December 7,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the dates of the visit.
Mr Putin visited Iran in July 2022, while Russian diplomatic chief Sergei Lavrov was welcomed in Tehran last October for talks with regional leaders.
According to Iran’s official Irna news agency, Mr. Raïssi is traveling to Moscow at the head of a “high-level political-economic delegation.”
“Bilateral issues, including economic interactions, as well as discussions on regional and international issues, especially the situation in Gaza, will be high on the agenda of the one-day trip,” the Iranian agency added.
The West accuses Iran of participating in Russia’s war effort by supplying large quantities of Shahed explosive drones and other weapons that Russia uses to carry out its campaign of massive bombings of Ukrainian cities.
Before this diplomatic sequence, Vladimir Putin traveled to China in October, on the sidelines of the New Silk Roads Forum, to his ally Xi Jinping in China. A visit that gave the two heads of state an opportunity to express their solidarity.
A few days earlier, he had traveled to Kyrgyzstan, another country allied with Moscow, on his first trip abroad since the ICC’s arrest warrant was issued.
Between the pandemic and the offensive in Ukraine, Mr Putin restricted his travel for almost four years.