Russia-Australia Relations before and after the Ukrainian Crisis

Abstract

The crisis of Australian-Russian relations after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the set of factors that caused it have received little attention from scholars of international affairs. The article contributes to addressing this research lacuna. It examines the 2014–2015 crisis in bilateral relations from the point of view of both Moscow and of Canberra. The author analyses the evolution of these relations before 2014 to understand whether the Ukrainian crisis was the cause of their sharp deterioration in 2014–2015, or it only accelerated the process that began much earlier. He demonstrates that Australia had no close political and economic ties with Russia, and the two countries did not consider each other as priority partners. The article finds that in 2014–2015 the Kremlin did not take into account a number of factors, such as very limited interest of Australia in commercial exchanges with Russia, Canberra’s growing suspicions about Moscow’s foreign policy intentions and view of Russia as a revisionist power (especially after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war), a strong sense of solidarity with the West among Australia’s political elites, and Russia’s increasingly worsening public image in Australia, that negatively affected Canberra’s stance towards the Kremlin even before 2014, and which greatly contributed to the crisis in bilateral relations. As for future development, the author identifies two factors that may have a negative impact on Russian-Australian relations: 1) rising energy demand in China and India, making Russia and Australia potential competitors in Asia’s gas markets; 2) a too close rapprochement of Moscow with Beijing, fraught
with the risk of embroiling Russia in a web of conflicts in the Western Pacific.