If, in France, the Ukraine of President Volodymyr Zelensky seems to be winning the battle of information and social networks, among the demographic giants of our planet, this is sometimes far from being the case, as in Indonesia. Vladimir Putin is currently experiencing a surge in popularity there on social networks, in particular for religious reasons in this country which has the most Muslims in the world.
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This coast of love is based in particular on this idea, which is gaining more and more ground: the Russian president would be on the side of the Muslims. Video archives circulate a lot, where we see him condemning the caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, or even when he shows his closeness to the Chechen Muslim leader Kaydyrov. And in a fairly binary vision of the world with the West on one side, represented by the United States, NATO, and on the other, oppressed Muslim populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, Putin sides then in the camp of Islam for more and more Indonesian Internet users.
And the fact that Chechnya, carried by Ramzan Kadyrov, who does not hesitate to show his Muslim faith, also sends a thousand men to fight alongside the Russian army in Ukraine, has only reinforced this pro-ideology. -Russian which remains quite new in the country, where the oldest generations remember the invasion of the Russians in Afghanistan and where the slightest communist symbol is prohibited by law. However, the shadow of the USSR still hovers a lot over Russia and until recently fueled above all distrust in public opinion.
To reinforce this vision, some even rely on the Koran, and in particular a hadith, an oral word reported by the prophet. This sentence is highly publicized at the moment: it evokes a non-Muslim people with which its faithful will join forces at the end of time to fight a common enemy. In the French versions, the name of this people is often translated by “the Romans”. But in Indonesian, it is “Rûm”, a somewhat mysterious name that lends itself to a lot of conjecture.
On TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, now, accounts with hundreds of thousands, even millions of subscribers, are certain: this people in question are the Russians, whose Orthodox Christian religion would be the direct heir of the Byzantine Roman Empire to which the sacred texts would refer, venture these Internet users. The end of time is more imminent than ever, adds others, such as Imran Hosein, a Muslim scholar who, from neighboring Malaysia, also considers Putin’s Russia as the “Rûm” described by the Koran, and proposes on YouTube gave its 342,000 subscribers a video titled “The Prophet Predicted Nuclear World War III.” As for the common enemy, it would be the West.
And it seems quite difficult to qualify this pro-Russian enthusiasm. “Most Indonesians I talk to, when I tell them ‘I study Russia’then they tell me ‘Russia is communist,’ notes Indonesian scholar Radityo Dharmaputra, who studies the Russian world at the University of Tartu in Estonia.There is really a great ignorance on this subject because there are really not many people who study or talk about Russian geopolitics. We talk a lot about the United States, Europe, but not about Russia in Indonesia. And this void was partly filled by the communication of the Russian Embassy and the Russian Cultural Center”, he specifies.
The Ukrainian Embassy, which has far fewer social media followers, still managed to get an interview with the leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization, after the war began. , which has some 90 million members and is fairly progressive in orientation. She then condemned the war, before meeting the Russian ambassador in the country.
But according to the analyzes of the regional media SCMP, if the Ukrainian and Russian delegations rushed to meet Nahdlatul Ulama, it is not only for the substantial relay that he represents with a good number of Muslims in Indonesia, but also to hope influence the Indonesian president himself, whose lukewarmness on the Ukrainian issue has been noted by many observers. His government certainly condemned the invasion of Ukraine, but without ever naming Russia, which remains a non-negligible partner, particularly in terms of defence.