QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – A new paper by Anna Borshchevskaya, appearing in the Middle East Policy journal, outlines Russia’s relationship with the Kurds. It is a long relationship, the author concludes, but a one-sided one.
Russia first came into contact with the Kurds in the late 18th century. St. Petersburg quickly became the center for the study of Kurdology. By 1897, 100,000 Kurds were already living in the Russian Empire. Moscow had a vested interest in using Kurds as pawns in Iran, which it briefly occupied, and against the Ottoman Empire, with which it fought several wars.
As the Bolsheviks took power, the Kurds were courted as one of many nations being offered national liberation under the Soviet Union. In 1923, Moscow established the so-called ‘Red Kurdistan’ in the Karabakh Valley. The Soviet Republic lived on until 1929. After the fall of the Mahabad Republic in Iranian Kurdistan in 1946, the Soviet Union hosted mullah Mustafa Barzani, one of its founders. It would use the Kurdish figure over the next decades in order to put pressure on a Western-leaning Iraq. Soviet mediation in 1970 handed Iraqi Kurdistan its first autonomy agreement.
Moscow also lent its support to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey in order to pressure Ankara, a NATO member. In 1996, it leveraged its support for the PKK in order to get concessions from Turkey not to support Chechen separatism during Russia’s bloody war in the Caucasus. By 1999, there were around one million Kurds living in the former Soviet Union.
Russia attempted to court the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syrian Kurdistan, or Rojava, at the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. In 2013, Russia stated that it should be present at the Geneva talks to solve the conflict. In 2016, the PYD was able to open an office in Moscow, over Ankara’s protests.
Yet Russia has not been a reliable partner to the Kurds in Syria. In 2018, Russian troops pulled back from Aleppo northern countryside and opened the airspace over Afrin to Turkey, which duly occupied the majority-Kurdish region. As Russia edged closer to Turkey and continued to support the government of Bashar al-Assad, which opposes Kurdish autonomy, Syria’s Kurds have entered into a partnership with Washington.
Yet America’s double-dealing, leading to a second Turkish invasion in 2019, means that the Kurds have had to balance the two imperial powers. After 2019, Russia was allowed to encroach further into the region, pushing into Kobani, Ain Issa, Tel Tamr, and northern Jazira (Hasakah Governorate). Occasionally, Russia will act as a mediator between Kurdish forces and government militias, like during the 2021 Qamishli clashes.
Distrust of Russia, however, is growing. Moscow has increasingly hosted quadrilateral meetings with the governments of Turkey, Syria and Iran. Its growing ties with Ankara, especially, worries Syria’s Kurds. The scars of 2018 are still present. When the Russian troops in Shahba region (Aleppo northern countryside), a sliver of land next to Afrin which was left in Kurdish hands, pushed back from their bases there as part of their normal troop rotation last week, many Kurds flooded the internet with messages of doom. This is hardly the basis for a healthy relationship.