Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook
for fragile states
Tarek Megerisi
Cultivation: How Russia enters
geopolitical vacuums
…
A bear knocks at the door
In 2014 Russia had to regrow its influence, almost from scratch, in a new Libya that was fracturing politically, economically and militarily. The Kremlin encouraged groups of Russia’s elites to approach Libyans from their respective angles: politicos doing diplomacy, oligarchs conducting economic outreach, and the ministry of defence overseeing military partnership building. Russian foreign policy experts have since described this process as a competition to see who could bring the best prize back to Putin.[2] Intentionally or not, the result of this scoping exercise was a platform on which Russia could build more complex foreign policy.
The diplomatic track was heavily influenced by Ramzan Kadyrov. The Chechen leader had worked closely with Putin on Middle East policy since the early 2010s, acting as something of a cultural envoy for Russia thanks to longstanding connections between the region and Chechnya.
In 2015 Kadyrov picked a close associate, Lev Dengov (a career diplomat with previous experience in Libya) to lead the new “Russian contact group for intra-Libyan settlement”. This would become the Russian foreign ministry’s official vehicle to engage with Libya. The contact group was a mission focused on Libya’s Tripoli-based and internationally recognised government of national accord (GNA).
To supplement this, Russia used Kadyrov’s links with Islamist and old revolutionary armed groups to expand its network across western Libya. This allowed Russia to set itself up as a mediator between Libya’s warring parties and helped ensure it a place in the UN-led political process to reunify the country. In March 2017, then GNA president Fayez Sarraj visited Moscow, the Kremlin used the visit to push its narrative on how the West broke Libya and pose as the one who would fix it. It was also an opportunity to get Sarraj to promise to review the Russian contracts that were lost in 2011 with the fall of Qaddafi.
Also competing for Putin’s approval were an assortment of oligarchs and business figures with commercial ties to Libya. They helped economically re-establish Russia across Libya and leverage the value of the former contracts to develop political allies who could restart frozen projects. But the most successful of Putin’s men were those from the ministry of defence.
In 2014 Russia had reached out to militia leader Ibrahim Jathran, who then controlled Libya’s lucrative oil crescent, an eastern coastal area rich in hydrocarbons. Jathran had blocked Libyan oil exports, holding the country to ransom in a power move he justified as a demand for more equitable division of oil revenues.
In a deal that would have turned this opportunistic yet small-time militia leader into a serious national force, Russian agents offered Jathran weapons and help to illicitly sell oil and get into government. According to Russian foreign policy experts, the Kremlin places great value on monogamy in its proxies. Moscow accordingly demanded to be the militia leader’s sole foreign backer. This was also an apparent attempt to develop an exclusive partnership on valuable Libyan real estate. Ultimately, Jathran backed out following pressure from other intervening states.
Since Haftar—then a disgraced Qaddafi-era “general”—returned from exile in the US in 2011, he has attempted several coups in Libya. So far, after years of gruelling military campaigns and thanks to considerable foreign support, he can claim control of Libya’s eastern province of Cyrenaica and its southern province of Fezzan.
In May 2014 Haftar launched “Operation Dignity”, a key formal trigger for Libya’s first post-uprising civil war. The general advertised this as a push to purge extremists from the eastern city of Benghazi, following assassination campaigns that had plunged the city into fear, and which he entirely blamed on his enemies. Haftar managed to rally former regime officers and eastern tribes to create a new military force, the “Libyan Arab Armed Forces” (LAAF).
The LAAF was an expression of its external backing. Egypt helped Haftar design his army and the UAE provided the funding, technology and know-how. Both regional powers had also cultivated his failed coup against Tripoli in February 2014 and then drove his subsequent military operation on from behind. Haftar’s operation thus opened a Libyan front in a Gulf-driven counter-revolution to revert the Arab world’s nascent democracies to authoritarian rule, one that Sisi had begun in Egypt the previous year.
Haftar and his band of former officers were familiar with Russia, having trained at the Soviet Frunze Military Academy. But the general, with his strong ties to the West, was far from the unclaimed prize Jathran would have been. Russia would also have likely hesitated to take a side in what the Kremlin perceived to be a regional spat: with Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia supporting Haftar; and with Turkey and Qatar considered to be behind a rival, Islamist movement called “Libya Dawn”.
Accordingly, Russia’s initial support for Haftar was low-key. In the first two years of Operation Dignity, Russian arms were quietly air freighted in cargo planes to Tobruk on Libya’s eastern Mediterranean coast. Russian Sukhoi, Mi-8, and MiG-21 military aircraft appeared in the country to join Haftar’s ageing Soviet fleet, as did military trainers, technicians and advisers. Russia provided all this in cooperation with the UAE and Egypt.
Indeed, that the support happened at all was likely down to Moscow’s willingness to trade exclusivity for an opportunity to strengthen Russian relations with those regional powers which were considered more important than Libya, like the UAE. This became the foundation of a military alliance between Moscow and Abu Dhabi that would later flourish, helping to ignite more civil wars in Libya, then in Sudan, and later fuelling Russia’s push through the Sahel. Simultaneously, Moscow used its official contact group in western Libya, via Dengov, to maintain plausible deniability and claim that Russia’s position was support for the UN-led peace process (and the ongoing 2011 Security Council arms embargo).
From 2016 Russia’s quiet support for Haftar began to get much louder. In May the Russian mint Goznac printed 4bn dinars ($2.9bn) of a counterfeit Libyan currency to provide liquidity to Haftar’s cash-strapped operation. It did this through a parallel central bank inaugurated by Libya’s parliament, the House of Representatives, which sat in Haftar-controlled Tobruk.
Despite protestations from the GNA and Western governments, given that these notes differed from Libya’s official currency printed by Britain’s De La Rue, the GNA eventually accepted the Russian bills as Libyan tender. This was likely because not doing so could have led to completely divided economic systems that would be near impossible to reunify.
In June Haftar visited Moscow, where he met defence minister Sergei Shoigu and security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev. The general used this first Russia visit to formally request more advanced weapons systems and replacements for the LAAF’s ageing aircraft. Haftar’s spokesman hailed the trip as a successful formalisation of the relationship. The agreements reportedly included weapons maintenance and air defences, and enabled the LAAF to claim frozen Qaddafi-era arms contracts.
For its part, the Kremlin publicly maintained that Russia could not re-activate weapons contracts until the arms embargo was lifted. But the claims of Jathran’s lieutenants when Haftar swept the oil crescent in September 2016 suggests advanced weaponry was being transferred regardless. These claims were corroborated by new munitions such as Russian-made guided artillery shells suddenly appearing in Haftar’s battles.
Having gained control over Libya’s reactivated oil terminals, Haftar was emboldened to push for more. In September, he anointed himself with the rank of field marshal. Shortly after, he dispatched an ambassador to Moscow to request a Syria-style intervention. Haftar then returned himself in November, allegedly offering Russia an airbase near Benghazi if it could get rid of the arms embargoKhalifa Haftar in Moscow after his meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, November 29th, 2016.
A few things were likely behind the romance of 2016. Firstly, Moscow had failed to secure exclusivity over any military proxy. Jathran was a busted flush. The western Libyan armed groups Kadyrov had engaged were working closely with the US, Britain and Italy in a military operation to free the central city of Sirte from the Islamic State group.
Secondly, the Haftar project helped Moscow show it could be a practical friend to the America’s most active regional partner, the UAE. Moscow had also managed to deepen relations with Cairo in its bid to to secure rights over Sidi Barrani, a Soviet-era airbase on Egypt’s far western coastline. Conveniently enough, the Sidi Barrani airbase was also a significant platform for Russia’s stepped up assistance to Haftar, just as Russia deployed special forces to the Egyptian base.
Perhaps most importantly, though, Russia was far from the only intervening power claiming to support the UN while developing its own proxies and securing its interests. International norms around Libya were being chipped away by a multitude of states pursuing their own gains. France, for instance, was actively supporting Haftar and flouting the arms embargo alongside Egypt, Russia and the UAE, believing only a strongman could bring stability to Libya’s multitude of militias.
It found itself against Italy, which was cooperating with western Libyan authorities and militias in the hope that this would stop hundreds of thousands of migrants from crossing the Mediterranean and ending up on its shores. The UK and Turkey also sided with the western, internationally recognised authorities.
This rejection of the rules-based order for unilateral interventions around individual actors and forces diminished Libya’s potential for political progress. Europeans had also validated a game they could only lose against states willing to use force and violate norms more flagrantly. Russia favoured this game. In the words of Gerald Feierstein, a senior US diplomat for the Middle East, Putin was “pushing the envelope” and would keep doing so “until he was stopped”.
Putin was not stopped. But Russia would have to shift its focus to deepen its engagement in Libya. Haftar’s “love-bombing” of Moscow over 2016 could not alter the fact that lifting the arms embargo was practically impossible. Libya was still divided, Haftar was still warring in Benghazi, and he was still detested by western Libyan groups. The returns for the Kremlin had seemingly plateaued. Compared with the UAE and France, Russia remained a junior partner in Haftar’s military coalition. And there would be no Russian base in Egypt, as the newly inaugurated US president—one Donald Trump—worked to improve relations with his “favourite dictator”, President Sisi. So, it seems that Russia pivoted from proxy building to pursuing formal political engagement. This is a pivot that would reappear multiple times over the coming years.
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Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.
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