Putin Hosts Indonesia's Prabowo at Vladivostok as Russia and China Expand a $240 Billion Project List

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, met Prabowo Subianto, the president of Indonesia, at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Thursday, where Prabowo is the principal guest. Putin described Indonesia as one of Russia's key partners in Southeast Asia and pointed to joint work across several sectors, while Prabowo thanked his host for the reception and stressed the importance of maritime cooperation. It is Prabowo's second visit to Russia this year and the sixth contact between the two leaders, and Putin arrived in Vladivostok directly from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek.

The commercial content of the forum points the same direction. TASS reports that the Russian and Chinese intergovernmental commission has expanded its portfolio to 65 major and 26 prospective projects worth about $240 billion. Russia's industry ministry, its far east development ministry, the Primorye regional government and a private investor signed an agreement at the forum to build what Kommersant describes as the country's largest production complex for compound semiconductors, the materials used in radio frequency and power electronics rather than in general purpose processors.

Read together, these are three parts of one project. Russia, excluded from Western capital markets and technology supply, is assembling an alternative set of customers, financiers and equipment suppliers. Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia, is not choosing a side. It is declining to be forced into one, and its president has made membership in multiple overlapping groupings the working method of Indonesian foreign policy.

None of this displaces the dollar or Western technology in the near term. Compound semiconductor fabrication requires equipment that remains concentrated in a handful of Western and Japanese firms, and a project list worth $240 billion is a list, not a spending run rate. What has changed is the density of the meetings. Countries that once negotiated with Moscow bilaterally and quietly now do so at a public forum, on camera, without paying a political cost.