Indonesia’s defence minister has said reports Russia is seeking to base military aircraft in the country “are simply not true”, according to the Australian government, after Canberra made urgent calls to Jakarta.
The report from defence and security news website Janes said 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.
But Richard Marles, Australia’s defence minister and deputy prime minister, said in a statement on Tuesday night that he had spoken to his Indonesian counterpart, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, about the reports.
“[He] said to me in the clearest possible terms, reports of the prospect of Russian aircraft operating from Indonesia are simply not true,” Marles said.
Marles had earlier 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.
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 Papua region, is about 1,400km from Darwin.
The Australian prime minister, Anthony 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 [the Russian president] Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian leader who has broken international law, that is attacking the sovereignty of the nation of Ukraine.”
Asked on Tuesday about the report, the Kremlin declined to comment. In a call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the report: “There are a lot of different pieces of fake news around, publications in the media, including those that relate to sensitive areas. But in this case we are not commenting on such publications.”
Janes’ report said the Indonesian defence minister received the request following his meeting in February with Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s security council and a longtime Putin ally.
Australia is in the middle of an election campaign, with the news emerging while Albanese and his main opponent, the Liberal party leader, 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.
At a separate press conference, the Australian foreign minister, Penny Wong, said she was “aware of the reports” and that 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.
Senior Indonesian military officials and the Russian embassy in Jakarta did not immediately respond to comment on the reported proposal, but analysts said it was 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,” Yohanes Sulaiman, a defence analyst and lecturer at the Jenderal Achmad Yani university, said. “The Indonesian military is very averse to having other countries build military bases in Indonesia.”
Member of Commission I of the Indonesian House of Representatives, Major General TNI (ret.) TB Hasanuddin, emphasised that the establishment of foreign military bases in Indonesian territory would be a violation of the constitution.
“Our constitution and various laws and regulations expressly prohibit the existence of foreign military bases,” he said in a statement.
“The establishment of foreign military bases will only drag Indonesia into geopolitical games that are counterproductive to world peace.”
Indonesia has long practised what it called an “independent and active” foreign policy, which emphasises its commitment to non-alignment.
In recent years it has held military exercises with the US, Australia and China. In November 2024, Indonesia and Russia held their first 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 Sjamsoeddin-Shoigu 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.
