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Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese has said officials are seeking further information after a report emerged that Russia is seeking to base military aircraft in Indonesia’s remote Papua region, on Australia’s northern doorstep.
Albanese said on Tuesday: “We obviously do not want to see Russian influence in our region, very clearly.
“We have a position, which is we stand with Ukraine, we regard Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian leader who has broken international law, that is attacking the sovereignty of the nation of Ukraine.”
Earlier his deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, downplayed the report that Moscow had filed an official request with Jakarta for permission for Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) aircraft, including several long-range aircraft, to be based at a facility in Biak, according to a report by defence and security news website Janes.
The airbase in Biak is home to the Indonesian Air Force’s Aviation Squadron 27, which operates a fleet of CN235 surveillance aircraft. Biak, in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua, is about 1,400km from Darwin.
The report said the Indonesian defence minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin received the request following his meeting in February with Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and a longtime Putin ally.
Responding to the development Marles was quick to warn that Jakarta is yet to acknowledge or respond to the request.
“I’d note at this point, Indonesia has not responded to this request. We will keep engaging with Indonesia in a way which befits a very close friend and a very close friendship between our two countries,” he said.
“We have been very focused on developing our bilateral relationship with Indonesia, including our bilateral defence relationship with Indonesia.”
At a seperate press conference foreign minister Penny Wong said she was “aware of the reports”, and the government was in the process of finding out more information.
“We, as a government, have reached out to confirm those reports and to understand whether or not those reports are accurate and what the status of those requests from Russia are,” she said.
Australia is in the midst of an election campaign, with the news emerging while Albanese and his main opponent, leader of the Liberal party Peter Dutton, took part in campaign activities. Dutton told a press conference that Putin was “not welcome in our neighbourhood”.
“We do not want a presence, a military presence, from Russia in our region, which would be destabilising for South-East Asia, and it would certainly be a very different calculation for the risks that are posed to our country in a period that is very uncertain,” Dutton said.
He said the Australian Labor government should reveal whether it received forewarning of the Russian request from Indonesia, a detail Albanese did not offer in his press conference.
Albanese repeated several times that his government was seeking further information or “proper clarification”, but would not provide any substantial comment.
“That’s the way you deal with international relations. Making sure that you’re not flying from the hip,” he said.
Senior Indonesian military officials and the Russian embassy in Jakarta did not immediately respond to comment on the reported proposal, but analysts say it is unlikely the unusual request would be granted given how geopolitically risky it would be.
“Even if Russia is proposing to use an Indonesian airbase, I doubt that the government will allow it. There will be a very significant blowback,” said Yohanes Sulaiman, a defence analyst and lecturer at General Achmad Yani university. “The Indonesian military is very averse to having other countries build military bases in Indonesia.”
Indonesia has long practised what it called a “bebas and aktif”, or an “independent and active” foreign policy, which emphasises its commitment to non-alignment.
In recent years Indonesia has held military exercises with the US, Australia and China. In November 2024, Indonesia and Russia held their first ever bilateral naval exercise off Java, a move that was deemed controversial amid widespread criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Indonesia and Russia pledged to strengthen their defence ties at the meeting in February. The meeting came after Indonesia, South-east Asia’s largest economy, was admitted as a full member to the Brics bloc of developing economies, of which Russia is one of the founding members.
