President Vladimir Putin opened a two-day summit with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Kazan on Wednesday, convening leaders from across the region even as the G7 gathered in parallel to discuss, among other matters, intensifying efforts to end the war in Ukraine. The choreography was unmistakable: while Donald Trump pressed Western allies on sanctions and peace frameworks, Putin received the prime ministers of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and Singapore, as well as Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Indonesia’s foreign minister, in the Tatarstan capital. The summit, marking the 35th anniversary of Russia-ASEAN dialogue and three decades since Moscow became a formal dialogue partner, was framed by the Kremlin as evidence that Western attempts to isolate Russia have foundered on the realities of a multipolar world.

Viewed from Southeast Asian capitals, the gathering was less about grand strategy than about concrete economic and energy imperatives. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim declared that his country’s military cooperation with Russia proceeds “without limitations,” encompassing tanks, aircraft, and other hardware, and signalled he would press Putin for increased oil deliveries. Philippine President Marcos, whose country holds the rotating ASEAN chairmanship this year, used his bilateral meeting to invite Putin to the bloc’s 25th summit in Manila in November — a gesture that, if accepted, would mark the Russian leader’s first visit to a formal US treaty ally in Southeast Asia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin also held talks with Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei, proposing a new intergovernmental commission to systematise bilateral trade and tourism ties.

Economic data lent substance to the rhetoric. Russia’s minister of economic development, Maxim Reshetnikov, told the accompanying business forum that Russian exports of mineral raw materials and oil to ASEAN states surged 40 per cent in the first quarter of the year, a spike he attributed partly to the crisis in the Ormuz Strait. ASEAN’s secretary-general, Kao Kim Horn, identified four priority sectors for deepened cooperation: energy, including LNG supply chains and grid modernisation; food security; industrial development; and digital technologies, notably artificial intelligence. Putin’s own written address to the forum, read aloud by Reshetnikov, invoked the parallel work of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Eurasian Economic Union, sketching the outlines of an institutional architecture that bypasses Western-led frameworks.

Analysts in London and Brussels note that the summit’s choreography — Putin visiting both an Orthodox cathedral and a mosque on the grounds of the Kazan Kremlin before his meetings, the heavy security deployment across the city — served a dual purpose. Domestically, it projected the image of a leader at ease among diverse civilisations; externally, it reinforced Moscow’s claim to be a pole of attraction for the Global South. Whether the bonhomie translates into durable strategic alignment remains an open question. ASEAN members have historically resisted being drawn into great-power rivalries, and the bloc’s consensus-driven culture militates against any formal tilt toward Moscow. Yet the summit demonstrated that, for a grouping acutely sensitive to energy prices and food-supply chains, Russia’s role as a reliable commodities supplier carries a weight that diplomatic pressure from Washington has so far failed to counterbalance.