Russia Exploits Muslim Jihad in Ukraine After Centuries of Courting Muslims for Political

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Putin’s outreach to Muslims extends beyond Russia’s borders. Russia became an observer in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 2005 and established the Strategic Vision Group “Russia-Islamic World” the following year. The group includes government officials, religious leaders, and public figures from 27 Islamic countries.

Moscow launched RT Arabic in 2007 and established Russian cultural centers across the Middle East and North Africa. Since 2009, it has also hosted the annual Russia-Islamic World economic forum. Putin elevated the forum to a federal event in 2023.

The Kremlin has also cultivated partnerships with Gulf states based on what it calls “moderate Islam.” A 2016 conference in Grozny, co-hosted with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, helped repair relations strained by the Syrian war. That year, Putin called Russia a “reliable ally” of the Islamic world, citing its military campaign in Syria. Kadyrov supported this outreach by performing the Hajj in 2018 and 2022 and meeting Saudi leaders during both visits.

Putin’s government applied the same approach in Crimea after the 2014 annexation. Moscow initially courted the peninsula’s Muslim population, promising the Crimean Tatars, who represented about 15 percent of the population, that their rights would be restored. The Kremlin also promised that Tatar would become an official language alongside Russian and Ukrainian and that Russia would show greater respect for Islam than the Tatars had received under Kyiv.

The Kremlin worked through aligned Russian Muslim institutions to maintain Muslim loyalty and portrayed Russia as “part of the Muslim world.” The strategy largely failed in Crimea. Unlike the peninsula’s ethnic Russian majority, most Tatars opposed the annexation. They organized patrols to prevent Russian soldiers, armored personnel carriers, pro-Russian paramilitaries, and Cossacks from entering their villages.

Moscow responded by exiling community leaders, banning rallies, closing Tatar media outlets, and obstructing the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatars’ representative body. Russia formally outlawed the Mejlis as an extremist organization in 2016. The response demonstrated that Moscow’s support for Muslim institutions depended on political loyalty rather than concern for the welfare of Muslim populations.

Russia expanded its outreach to the Islamic world after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as part of its attempt to counter Western influence. Its March 2023 foreign policy concept used the word “Islamic” for the first time and called for deeper relations with Muslim-majority countries. That year, Russia began introducing Islamic banking in Dagestan, Chechnya, Bashkortostan, and Tatarstan.

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