Russia’s Red Sea Rising

What do Sudan and Russia have in common? If your answer is a naval logistics base at the southern entrance of the Red Sea, then you are on the money. Whilst this strategic alliance, one that provides Russia with a place to house up to three hundred personnel and four warships, seems like an unusual expression of unity between two culturally distinct countries, the historic relationship of the pair trend way back.

In 1961, the thought of pirog in Port Sudan seemed like a distant concept for the five year old independent nation. Sudan had recently joined the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’, a union of developing nations not aligned to any existing power bloc. It remains one of the largest groupings of states globally, second only to the United Nations. Even as the Cold War began to dominate the political landscape, by which time many countries within the Non-Aligned Movement had in fact aligned to either the United States or the USSR, Sudan enjoyed relative neutrality. That changed when the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, keen to avoid another armed conflict with nearly half a million troops bogged down in Vietnam, ramped up diplomatic support for Sudan’s adversary Israel at the height of the ‘Six Day War’. Khartoum severed relations with Washington in the aftermath, and it would take four years coupled with an attempted communist-led coup for them to warm again. During this interlude, over two thousand Soviet advisers had formed a satellite within the fledgling state.

The ascension of two notorious strongmen, military leader Omar al-Bashir who took…