Naval forces of Indonesia and Russia began their first joint military training drills in the Java Sea.
Analysts comment that this shows the Southeast Asian country’s willingness to befriend any country.
The joint exercise comes as Indonesia’s newly-inaugurated President Prabowo Subianto has pledged closer ties with Russia on defence, in his bid to forge ties with any country as part of his country’s long-held non-alignment foreign policy.
The drills take place in the Java Sea near Indonesia’s Surabaya city, east of the capital Jakarta, for 5 days as four Russian war ships arrived on location.
“The joint drills are an actualisation of an international partnership between the Indonesian and the Russian navies that’s been constantly good,” navy spokesperson I Made Wira Hady Arsanta Wardhana said in a statement, providing no further details on what the exercise entailed.
The statement quoted a Russian delegation representative as saying that the exercise was designed for the two navies to exchange knowledge.
The Russian embassy in Jakarta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
Sergey Tolchenov, Russia’s ambassador to Indonesia, said last month in an interview with Russian state news agency TASS that the drills were the “first large-scale naval exercises of Russia and Indonesia”.
Prabowo called Russia his “great friend” when he went to Moscow in July.
Indonesia has held military exercises with other countries. It has held the annual “Super Garuda Shield” drills with the United States since 2006 and the 2024 edition featured over 4,500 personnel and took place for two weeks.
