Analysis: Why Russia has its eye on Hawaii

Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up a Pacific diplomatic tour in Hawaii on Saturday as Russian troops were massed on the Ukrainian border in Europe. American officials have stated they consider the Pacific region to be their top strategic priority and want to assure regional allies they haven’t forgotten them even as tensions brew elsewhere.

But Russia has not forgotten the Pacific either.

While American policymakers have been vocal about wanting to keep an eye on China’s growing presence in the Pacific, over the last year it’s been Russia’s military operating most overtly near Hawaii — the nerve center for American military operations in the region.

Hawaii has a complicated relationship with Russia, which is simultaneously a military rival for U.S. forces in the islands and a key player in supplying oil that Hawaii depends on to power its electrical grids. The Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism’s 2020 State of Hawaii Data Book listed Russia as the state’s No. 3 international trading partner for imports.

That attracts both Russian ships and spies.

In May, the U.S. military tracked the Vladivostok- based Russian spy ship the Kareliya lingering about 15 miles to the west of Kauai, prompting American commanders to delay a planned missile test at the Pacific Missile Testing Range.

The Kareliya’s arrival preceded the arrival of dozens of warships and planes from Russia’s Pacific Fleet in June just off the Hawaiian islands that conducted what Russian officials described as the largest exercise its Navy has conducted in the Pacific since the end of the Cold War.

Hawaii National Guard F-22s scrambled several times in response to Russian bombers flying close to Hawaii’s airspace, though there were no direct confrontations. After the majority of the warships left at the end of the exercise, a spy ship stayed behind to monitor maneuvers by the American aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson off Hawaii.

Last month the U.S. military again tracked a Russian spy ship sailing near Hawaii. Its arrival came as the Russian military began its latest buildup around Ukraine. Russia previously invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014.

Wade Turvold, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Waikiki, said that all countries want to keep tabs on their rivals. The Russian military operates ballistic missile submarines around the world, including in the Pacific, and likely has other assets in the Russian Far East.

“Russia gets great strategic bounce from having the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. And so it’s very, very cautious of maintaining the safety of its (nuclear submarine) bastions,” Turvold said. “Therefore Russia wants to know what and where the U.S. military is operating.”

But Russia’s interests in the Pacific are broader — and go back much further.

A Pacific power

The Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet has its origins in Tsarist Russia and was used to enable the empire’s colonization of Alaska and several other parts of North America’s Pacific Coast.

Agents of the Russian Empire even established three forts on Kauai, most notably Fort Elizabeth, and mounted a coup attempt against King Kamehameha I in 1817. But the coup, known as the Schaffer Affair, was launched without the tsar’s knowledge and failed spectacularly, effectively ending Russian hopes of establishing a strategic outpost in Hawaii.

After World War II the Soviet Union invaded and annexed the Kuril Islands from the defeated Japanese Empire. To this day the islands, where the Japanese Navy assembled its force for the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, remain disputed territory between Tokyo and Moscow.

“What those four southern Kuril Islands give Russia is unimpeded access to the Pacific Ocean,” Turvold said. “Russia considers itself a great power, and great powers don’t give up territory.”

During the Cold War, Russia’s Pacific Fleet — then called the Red Banner Pacific Fleet — hauled weapons to communist allies and guerrilla movements across the Pacific and Indian oceans and dispatched submarines and spy ships to the waters around Hawaii and Guam. Oahu-based U.S. Navy P-3 Orion surveillance planes were on a constant lookout for Soviet submarines.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russians living on their country’s Pacific coast moved west to Europe in hopes of finding greater economic prospects. The Russian Pacific Fleet also also shrank in a post- Soviet naval reorganization.

But in 2010 Russian President Vladimir Putin announced plans for a “turn to the east,” a re-investment in Siberia and Russia’s Pacific coast in hopes of lessening the country’s dependence on trade with Europe and exporting its vast oil and natural gas reserves to growing economies across Asia. Russian officials also announced plans revamp their Pacific Fleet.

“Putin and Russia strategically recognized that the economic engine of the world is in the Indo-Pacific region, and they pivoted there a year before we did a re-balance there,” Turvold said.

In 2011 then-President Barack Obama announced America’s “Pivot to the Pacific” in recognition of the region’s growing importance, though the American pivot has been slowed by continued entanglements in sprawling conflicts elsewhere around the globe.

Russia still has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and maintains a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, but it has never fully recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia has a decreasing population and has a gross domestic product of about $1.5 trillion; the state of Texas alone has a GDP of $2 trillion. Even so, Russia currently spends 4.3% of its GDP on its military compared to the 3.7% the U.S. spends.

“In general, their strategic goal is to maintain their status as a great power, to have a seat at the table, if you will, which they know is going to be problematic with a decreasing population,” Turvold said. “It has an out-sized military for its economic stature, but it uses that quite effectively.”

In August the Russian Defence Ministry announced plans to beef up its military infrastructure in the Kuril Islands. In October, the Russian and Chinese navies held their first-ever joint patrols in the Sea of Japan and officials announced Russia’s Pacific Fleet would be receiving four new submarines.

Russia and China have stepped up cooperation in recent years, sharing military technology and increasing trade ties with an eye to challenging the entrenched international system the United States and its allies built after the Cold War.

“This ‘turn to East’ is really becoming the turn to China,” Turvold said. “China and Russia have congruent economies — Russia is flush with natural resources and China needs them. And so that has worked out well for both states.”

But the budding relationship isn’t without complications. The two powers’ interests sometimes diverge in unexpected ways.

“Although the Russia- China relationship is indeed growing closer, there are still a few points of disagreement, one of them being Russia’s involvement in the South China Sea,” said Lucas Myers, the coordinator for Southeast Asia at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

Oil, guns and money

Beijing considers almost the entire South China Sea, a critical waterway route through which at least one-third of all international trade travels, to be its exclusive territory within a maritime border called the “Nine-Dash Line,” including numerous territories claimed by neighboring Vietnam, the Philippines and others.

The Philippines issued a legal challenge, and in 2016 an international court ruled that most of Beijing’s claims had no legal basis. But the Chinese military has dug in, stationing troops and building bases on disputed land formations and sometimes attacking vessels from neighboring countries.

The Hawaii-based U.S. Pacific Fleet has stepped up “freedom of navigation operations” in the region and strengthened ties with countries that feel increasingly put upon by China’s claims, including former enemies like Vietnam. Though Russia officially claims neutrality in those disputes, it has also been quietly pursued its own interests in the region.

Russian ships delivering oil, natural gas and weapons are no strangers there. Russia is the top weapons exporter to South and Southeast Asian countries, including several engaged in territorial disputes with China.

Vietnam has been one of Russia’s top arms customers for decades, buying guns, planes, missiles and submarines. Vietnam’s state-owned PetroVietnam also has been working with Russian state-owned and semi-state-owned energy companies to drill for oil and gas in the South China Sea inside the Nine-Dash Line.

“For Vietnam, Russia provides a sense of security that China will likely restrain itself from being too aggressive against Russian-owned and -operated oil and gas rigs in the South China Sea,” Myers said. He added that China’s “gray zone” strategy of using maritime militias — ostensibly civilian vessels working with its military to harass foreign ships — is meant to give Beijing leeway to “apply coercive pressure below the threshold of military conflict.”

Over the past decade, disputes between Vietnam and China over undersea oil drilling rights have led to standoffs and occasional bursts of violence at sea, disrupting operations. In 2020, deployments of Chinese ships and political pressure from Beijing prompted Russian state-backed firm Rosneft to back out of an ambitious drilling project in disputed waters off Vietnam. On Feb. 4, Rosneft inked an $80 billion deal with China.

“As a result of Russia’s geographic distance and close ties to China, Vietnam and other countries cannot solely rely upon Russia against China’s claims in the South China Sea. This reality partly drives Vietnam’s outreach to the United States,” Myers said. But he added that those countries want to avoid being overly dependent on America, and “they will therefore attempt to keep Russia engaged as much as possible.”

Vietnam has been a key source of foreign oil for Hawaii, though data from DBEDT shows those imports have gradually declined at the same time tensions at sea have disrupted drilling operations. But the crude still flows.

In 2020 Vietnam provided about 3% of Hawaii’s imported oil, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. During the same period, 34% of oil imports to Hawaii in 2020 came from Russia, making it the top foreign oil source that year.

“You can kind of trace Russian military activity and the price of oil,” Turvold said. “When the price of oil is high, they have the money to fund military operations, to send their fleet to sea to exercise. When the price of oil is very depressed, then they don’t and you see their ships more in port.”

A changing map

Russian spying efforts in and around Hawaii could also relate in part to concerns closer to home for the Kremlin. The Hawaii-based U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s assets include most U.S. bases in Alaska.

Chinese, Russian and American military planners alike have been thinking much more about the prospect of Arctic operations. With melting of polar ice caps opening new trade routes and opportunities for undersea resource excavation that both the Kremlin and Beijing are eager to capitalize on, there’s an increasing confluence of Pacific and Arctic issues.

American fishermen off Alaska have been reporting increasing encounters with Russian military ships and aircraft conducting exercises in the Northern Pacific, and in August the Hawaii- based Coast Guard Cutter Kimball and other vessels reported encountering Chinese Navy ships transiting through the Aleutian Islands.

While both Russia and China are eager to challenge American power, the merging of Arctic and Pacific interests poses another potential point of friction between the two powers. Russia hopes to use new Arctic trade routes to sell its oil, while China hopes to drill for Arctic oil and mine for minerals.

“What’s really interesting is that China admonishes Russia not to make unlawful sea claims in the Arctic,” Turvold said. “Isn’t that funny, when they themselves, of course, have done so in the South China Sea.”

But for now both Russia and China seem content to work together to pursue their common interests. Though the eyes of the world are on the Russian military buildup in Ukraine, Russia is still keeping tabs on Hawaii.