On March 7, the Russian delegation led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov completed its tour of the Persian Gulf countries. The discussion of Syrian issues occupied a special place in its extensive agenda. Regrettably, the hope that the regional climate around Syria would warm up did not materialize for the time being. The wind of change from the Gulf seems to be losing power under US pressure but the ship of Russian diplomacy, for which the Syrian azimuth remains one of the key landmarks, should be picking up speed, believes Vladimir Bartenev, director of the Center for Security and Development Studies of the School of World Politics at Moscow State University and senior research associate of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies of the RAS Institute of Oriental Studies.
On March 7, the Russian delegation led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov completed its tour of the Persian Gulf countries. The chosen itinerary – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – demonstrated Moscow’s striving to ignore the new dividing lines, including those in the air, mapped out between neighboring states in 2017.
The visits had a fairly extensive agenda that has already been covered by a number of journalists who accompanied the delegation. Naturally enough, bilateral relations were central to it. In the last few years they followed rather predictable lines and the visits confirmed their sustainability once again.
At the same time the sides compared their positions on the most urgent regional issues that have a significant element of uncertainty. This applies to the issue of ensuring collective security and mutual relations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Palestinian problem, and the situation in the Arab countries affected by internationalized domestic conflicts. Special attention was paid to Syrian problems, which tend to reveal deep divergences between different regional and extra-regional actors.
Discussing the Syrian file in Doha, Riyadh, Kuwait City and Abu Dhabi, Russian diplomacy hoped for the consolidation of the trend towards the warming of the regional climate around Syria that revealed itself in the past few months, on the eve of the Arab League summit in Tunisia in late March. There were many positive signs indeed: the visit by President of Sudan Omar al-Bashir to Damascus, resumption of the work by the embassies of Bahrain and the UAE, which want to counter the growing influence of Iran, Turkey and Qatar, the visit of a representative Syrian delegation led by Secretary General of the Federation of the Syrian Chambers of Commerce Mohammad Hamsho to Abu Dhabi, and the return to the agenda of the political discourse of the issue of resuming Syria’s membership in the Arab League, which was suspended in 2011. Kuwait, for one, openly supported the latter.
However, according to numerous sources, in the past month Washington exerted serious pressure on the Gulf monarchies, primarily the UAE, both directly and indirectly via Saudi Arabia in order to slow down rapprochement with Damascus. US executive bodies used both formal and informal channels, and US lawmakers also played a big role in this. The submission to Congress of the bills envisaging tough financial sanctions for participation in Syria’s recovery had the effect of a cold shower on the US partners in the Persian Gulf.