Prabowo Courts Moscow With a $10 Billion Trade Ambition, 138 Oil Blocks, and Rusal Deal

VLADIVOSTOK, Investortrust.id — Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto launched an aggressive investment push into Russia on Thursday, announcing that global aluminum behemoth United Company Rusal is preparing a massive entry into the Southeast Asian nation while dangling access to 138 domestic oil and gas blocks for Russian exploration giants.

Speaking at the plenary session of the 2026 Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in the Far East port city of Vladivostok, Prabowo unveiled cross-border industrial tie-ups with Russian President Vladimir Putin looking on. Alongside Rusal's planned industrial footprint, state-owned agricultural chemicals giant PT Pupuk Indonesia inked a formal memorandum of understanding (MoU) to build gas-to-urea fertilizer production facilities directly inside Russia.

Prabowo's high-profile summitry accelerates Jakarta's strategic non-alignment doctrine, balancing Western economic ties with critical Russian resources across energy, mineral downstreaming, and food security. By securing direct access to Russian natural gas for fertilizer synthesis and drawing one of the world's largest primary aluminum producers into its smelting corridor, Indonesia is insulating its industrial supply chains while unlocking capital for its underexplored upstream oil and gas reserves.

Courting Industrial Giants and Opening Hydrocarbon Blocks

The planned entry of Rusal signals an expansion of Indonesia's metals processing boom, which has expanded beyond nickel into integrated bauxite and aluminum refining. "Rusal will enter Indonesia on a massive scale," Prabowo told global delegates at the forum on Thursday, hailing the Russian corporate giant as an elite global materials supplier while signaling forthcoming commercial frameworks.

Turning to domestic upstream resources, Prabowo delivered an open bidding call to Russian energy majors, pitching technical concessions across more than a hundred offshore and onshore fields to reverse domestic crude declines.

"We are inviting Russian entrepreneurs, corporations, and their proprietary technologies to invest and take active equity stakes across these 138 oil and gas blocks," Prabowo said on Thursday.

The cross-border balance sheet flows will run in both directions. Investment and Downstream Industry Minister Rosan Roeslani noted that Pupuk Indonesia's outbound capital deployment into Russian petrochemical plants leverages abundant Russian natural gas feedstocks to fortify food security at home. Deputy for Economic and Investment Coordination at the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs Edi Prio Pambudi confirmed inter-agency task forces are already formalizing regulatory frameworks to support the overseas joint venture.

Charming the Kremlin and Doubling Bilateral Trade

Prabowo’s energetic delivery captivated local media outlets, drawing prominent front-page coverage in Russian business daily Kommersant, which noted that Putin smiled throughout the speech as the Indonesian leader pivoted fluently into conversational Russian. Quoting the Russian proverb "one man in the field is not a warrior," Prabowo linked it to the Indonesian cultural maxim of mutual burden-sharing, framing post-Soviet ties as an equal, sovereign economic partnership rather than purely nostalgic legacy.

Beyond diplomatic symbolism, Prabowo laid out a concrete logistical roadmap to double two-way bilateral commerce from its 2025 watermark of roughly $5 billion to $10 billion annually. The plan demands direct sea shipping lanes connecting Indonesian ports with Vladivostok, specialized marine cargo insurance mechanisms, non-dollar cross-border clearing systems, and direct air links.

Central to this commercial push is the fast-track implementation of the Indonesia–Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) Free Trade Agreement, signed in St. Petersburg on Dec. 25, 2025. The pact slashes tariff barriers across more than 11,000 product lines across Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, positioning Indonesian agricultural exports and manufactured goods for tariff-free access across northern Eurasia.