SYDNEY: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s flurry of meetings with Asia-Pacific leaders here in recent days inspired the inevitable headline in at least one Australian daily: “The Russians Are Coming.” On the sidelines of a regional summit along with 20 other world leaders, Putin had a slightly different message: the Russians are here to stay.

Adding weight to the diplomatic assurances were big new deals with nations that highlight Russia’s strengths in its traditional economic mainstays: arms and energy.

“We have recently come to the greatest dawn in Russian-Chinese relations,” Putin told Chinese President Hu Jintao at two-way talks here on Saturday. Words reinforced by $4 billion in new bilateral trade deals this year alone.

He assured his Chinese counterpart that whoever takes the reins of power in Russia’s March 2008 presidential vote, “there is no doubt that Russian policy toward China will not change in the coming years”. He had a similar message for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun in separate meetings on the margins of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

On his way to Sydney, Putin oversaw a billion-dollar deal to sell arms to Indonesia, and on Friday he signed an agreement that will let Russia buy an estimated $1 billion worth of Australian uranium a year.

Top officials from Russian state gas giant Gazprom were also on hand looking for new resources and markets.

“It’s no secret that we want to be the biggest supplier of natural gas to the Asia-Pacific region,” Gazprom deputy chairman Alexander Medvedev said.

All this is evidence that Moscow has made a decisive shift east, officials and analysts say.

“The illusion many people had in the 1990s that close relations with the United States and Europe were enough to solve Russia’s problems — that illusion is gone,” said Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the Russian parliament’s international affairs committee.

“No future Russian president, whoever it is, can alter Vladimir Putin’s strategic decision to develop our relations in the Asia-Pacific region in the most active way possible,” Kosachyov told the news agency.

Questions about Russia’s course under its next president — almost certain to be Putin’s handpicked choice — have kept domestic and foreign observers on tenterhooks.

Yet while Putin milks the suspense, he wants to assure his audience at home and abroad that the country will take no sharp turns, political analyst Fyodor Lukyanov said.

“Putin is saying: ‘Don’t worry, nothing terrible will happen after the elections. Relations with China and Japan aren’t going to be broken,’” Lukyanov said by telephone from Moscow.

Russia’s trade turnover with China, the region’s economic powerhouse, was around $40 billion in 2006, a fraction of US-Chinese trade of about 262 billion that year.

But Russia’s move east has been motivated equally by economic and political considerations. Asia’s surging energy demand makes it an obvious market for Russia, the world’s biggest energy supplier, while growing diplomatic relations compensate for strains with the West.

Moscow routinely talks up the importance of organisations such as APEC and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) while questioning the relevance of Western-dominated groups such as the Group of Eight and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.Kosachyov said the SCO was “becoming a more effective forum every year”, and was better suited than Nato to combating “the new threats of terrorism and arms trafficking”. The Shanghai-based group is also becoming more effective at rattling the West with ever-larger military exercises — such as an August operation into which Russia ploughed $80 million — while decrying US “monopolarity”. Russia is also eager for its Asian neighbours to provide financial and technical help in developing its struggling Far East region, “without which, the development of Russia as a whole is impossible,” Kosachyov said.

While China has thus far seen Russia chiefly as an energy supplier for its superheated economy, buying 15 million tonnes of its oil in 2006, China-Russia Business Council head Sergei Sanokoyev said that was changing.

“We’re already adding new elements to our economic relationship, including major industrial cooperation,” he told the news agency.

Putin’s assurances to Asian leaders “were very logical and very correct. In business circles, we understand our leaders’ signals,” Sanokoyev said.—AFP