Russia's international aid donorship: from diplomatic status symbol to “frontline aid”?

Abstract

Russia is generally considered to be a so-called ‘emerging aid donor’ since Moscow officially announced, at the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg in 2006, that it wanted to become a donor economy again after it had been a recipient economy for one and a half decades. More recently, Russia’s reception of refugees from south-eastern Ukraine and the Russian humanitarian convoys to resistance-held areas there added new controversy about the nature of its aid. Russia also manifested itself as an aid actor with its proposal to the International Red Cross, to have humanitarian truces in Yemen. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the proportions, characteristics and motives of Russia’s current official and officious policies of international development and humanitarian aid, and compare these with what some authors have identified as the identity dilemma in international relations which Russia has struggled with over the last 15 years, one between becoming a (regional) power again despite a number of lingering internal social-economic challenges, integrating into the G8 or leading among emergent economies, and promoting development and thus the export of a societal model or rather privilege the redistribution of wealth.