Dec 17, 2014

As events in Yemen become increasingly complex, Russia’s policy there looks increasingly simple: support the government, whoever it is, and encourage dialogue among the country’s many factions.

In trying to understand and explain Russia’s foreign policy in the Middle East, many outside observers turn first to Soviet policy. The USSR supported Syria’s longtime dictator Hafez al-Assad, this argument goes, so Russia today supports his son. Soviet Communist leaders backed the Palestine Liberation Organization, so Putin’s Kremlin does too. But while this approach may be subtly misleading in thinking about Syria or the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, it is obviously wrong in Yemen.

The clearest evidence of this is Moscow’s utter disinterest in supporting separatist rebels in the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, commonly known as South Yemen until its unification with the northern Yemen Arab Republic in 1990. Russia’s leaders have essentially ignored pleas from southern rebels, recently outlined in a letter to the Russian consulate in Aden. The fact that the rebels had to remind Moscow of its Cold War support for the south in a letter — rather than in a meeting with even a junior Russian diplomat in Aden, much less a Foreign Ministry official — speaks volumes.

One big problem for the south Yemeni separatists is that Yemen is not a top foreign policy priority for Russia. Russia’s and Yemen’s presidents have met only four times in 15 years, always in Moscow. Before Vladimir Putin met with Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi in April 2013, the last meeting was a 2009 conversation between Putin’s and Hadi’s predecessors, Dmitry Medvedev and Ali Abdullah Saleh. (Putin previously met Saleh twice, in 2002 and 2004.) As a practical matter, the Russia-Yemen relationship is largely in the hands of Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, who has many other pressing responsibilities. A deputy communications minister apparently led Russia’s delegation to the December session of the Joint Yemeni-Russian Committee, a bilateral effort to improve economic and other ties, and met with Prime Minister Khaled Bahah.

Even more significant, however, is the reality that Soviet policy is not Russian policy. Unlike the Soviet Union — which was committed to a global existential struggle against the United States and fomented violence in the Middle East to undermine America and its allies — today’s Russia sees instability as a danger, not a tool. Thus, Moscow’s principal objective in Yemen is containing Sunni Muslim extremist groups, especially al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Helping south Yemeni rebels to disrupt the status quo would undermine this aim; Russia’s diplomats are more interested in encouraging them to work with Hadi and to pursue dialogue rather than conflict.