On 13 November 2018, President Vladimir Putin arrived in Singapore for what would be his last trip to Southeast Asia before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 and his fateful decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Scheduled to meet Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong the day he arrived, the meeting was postponed after Putin’s aircraft had departed late from Moscow. Officially, the flight was delayed because of Putin’s “tight schedule”. However, the Russian president had a reputation for keeping foreign leaders waiting, sometimes for several hours, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth II. Was his tardiness in Singapore, as some Kremlin observers speculated, a power game designed to impress upon his hosts that he was the leader of a great power on a par with the United States and China?

If so, Putin might be disappointed to learn that, at least as far as the academic literature is concerned, Russia is not considered to be a great power in Southeast Asia. Since the early 2000s, academics working on the International Relations of Southeast Asia have focused on how the region has become the primary theatre of major power competition in the Asia-Pacific, or, as it is more commonly referred to these days the “Indo-Pacific”. In particular, scholars have intensively studied Southeast Asia’s multifaceted relations with China, the maritime territorial disputes in the South China Sea and how countries in the region attempt to navigate the perils and opportunities of US-China strategic rivalry.