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ASEAN-Russia partnership has long way to go: Expert
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Let’s talk: President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo (left) and Russian President Vladimir Putin attend a meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN-Russia Summit in Singapore on Wednesday. Indonesia is country coordinator for ASEAN-Russia affairs beginning in 2020. (Via Reuters/Sputnik/Alexei Druzhinin/Kremlin)
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s the latest country to become an ASEAN strategic partner, Russia still has a long way to go before it can achieve substantial returns on its now two-year relationship given the country’s ambivalence toward the region, a visiting Russian international relations expert has said.
At the 3rd ASEAN-Russia Summit in 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of ASEAN met in Singapore to commemorate the historic decision to elevate the ASEAN-Russia dialogue partnership to the level of a strategic partnership.
The idea was first introduced in 2016 when Russia and ASEAN celebrated 20 years of their partnership, said Victor Sumsky, the director of the ASEAN Center at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
“It was agreed that they should be moving towards the stage where they could become a ‘strategic partnership’, but it would take some time. I think we were under the impression that it would take five to 10 years, but we got there in 2018,” he said in a discussion hosted by the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia on Wednesday.
The “strategic partnership” moniker is awarded based on an ASEAN consensus to partner countries that have worked very closely and efficiently with the bloc, covering a gamut of undertakings that are deemed beneficial for both sides.
This is distinct from a conventional international relations perspective, in which a strategic partnership implies close cooperation in the security and defense spheres, experts have said.
In an op-ed he wrote in 2018, ASEAN journalist Kavi Chongkittavorn intimated that it “pained ASEAN greatly” not to upgrade the partnership with Russia in 2015 due to the lack of support among members. “Moscow [did not pay] enough attention to the grouping despite saying the right things officially,” Kavi said.
