The International Security Forum, a conference held at the Live Arena, a huge concert venue in the military park outside Moscow, was conceived as a direct challenge to the West’s high-level gatherings.
The Kremlin announced that the Forum, held at the end of May, would be an alternative to the Munich Security Conference, which for the past 63 years has been a key venue for security and military officials to discuss threats to the West, and develop a coordinated response. In 2007, Putin made a sensation there, with a near-9,000-word speech denouncing the “unipolar” world and NATO expansion.
Shut out from such gatherings of the powerful for at least the past four years (and the foreseeable future), Putin landed on an alternative. He would build a new and prestigious conference based on international gatherings organized by Russia’s Security Council for more than a decade, but on a bigger, much more ambitious scale. The SVR also threw its weight behind the effort.
Sergey Shoigu, head of the Security Council, set the tone in opening remarks which echoed Putin’s two-decade complaints that the West sought to limit Russia’s freedom of maneuver. “The unipolar construct is falling apart before our eyes,” he said. He was echoed by the SVR chief Sergey Naryshkin, who used a favored Kremlin 20th-century talking point by blaming many of Europe’s problems on Britain and its wickedness; France and Germany should not trust the UK, and should “finally learn the lessons of history and do not get involved with the hypocritical and treacherous Albion,” the spy chief said.
The gathering was hailed as the forum of what Russia and its sympathizers call the “global majority”, a term based on the interesting idea that since representatives of countries accounting for roughly 70% of the world’s population attended, those nations can be seen to hold a common position on global affairs. That position is — if it does indeed exist — remarkably close to the Kremlin’s.
And it’s true that 4,500 invitees from 120 countries came to Moscow, among them the heads of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, with most participants coming from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.
The scale of the effort suggests that Russia’s security establishment considered the forum as crucial.
The campaign to bring participants to Moscow gives a glimpse into the methods Russia uses to cultivate influence abroad.
Take, for example, the Middle East, particularly countries such as Lebanon and Egypt.
For decades, those two countries have been regarded as crucial for Russian intelligence, something rooted in Soviet times. While Egypt was seen as a key driver of political change across the region, Lebanon was viewed as a particularly useful place for targeting and recruiting Americans, especially those serving in the US intelligence community.
That is why so many KGB heavyweights specializing in recruiting Americans had a stint in Beirut at some point in their careers: from Rem Krassilnikov, who later headed operations against the CIA station in Moscow, to Victor Cherkashin, who handled the KGB’s most valuable assets inside the United States — Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI. Victor Budanov, the counterintelligence officer who interrogated the MI6 spy Oleg Gordievsky, also ran operations in Lebanon at one point. The MI6 turncoat Kim Philby was extracted from Beirut by the KGB in 1963 as British investigators suspecting his treason closed in on him.
To conduct operations in those countries during the Cold War, Moscow relied on several pillars. Two were its embassies and a network of Soviet foreign correspondents — entities like the TASS news agency provided cover for Russian intelligence officers. Unlike embassy personnel, those correspondents often remained in the region for decades, moving from Syria to Egypt to Lebanon and back.
There was also a third element in Moscow’s influence operations: the Russian Orthodox Church. Officially, Lebanon was outside the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate because it belonged to the Patriarchate of Antioch — an ancient and revered church with standing equal to that of Moscow.
When Stalin relaunched his global influence effort at the end of World War II, it included, among many other things, expanding Moscow’s influence in Lebanon and Syria through the Church, which had become an obedient servant of the Soviet state after Stalin restored the Patriarchate in 1943.
In 1945, the Soviet government arranged for the Russian Patriarch to visit Syria and Lebanon, and the Patriarch of Antioch to come to Moscow. The following year, a parish of the Russian Orthodox Church was opened in Lebanon, and a few years later, the Representation of the Patriarch of Moscow to the Patriarch of Great Antioch was set up in Syria.
Those Soviet-era networks never entirely disappeared. And in Moscow, the embassies of those countries were always part of the game, generating close attention from both the Moscow FSB directorate and the SVR.
In recent years, the networks have been revived and expanded, and nowadays all these elements work together. When the Russian community in Lebanon received a new church in 2024, gifted by the Antioch Metropolitan, the ceremony was attended by the Russian ambassador and the warden of the Orthodox compound in the country. The latter also happens to head TASS’s Lebanon bureau and has been working in Syria and Lebanon since the early 1980s.
A similar model appears to have been used in organizing what the Kremlin hopes will become a Russian counterpart to the Munich Security Conference.
The Security Council and the SVR took preparations for the conference very seriously. As part of the effort, Deputy Secretary of the Security Council Alexander Venediktov met the heads of several diplomatic missions of Middle Eastern and North African countries in March, including, according to the official statement, the ambassadors of Egypt and Lebanon, specifically to discuss the upcoming International Security Forum.
Egypt’s prominent role in the preparations was hardly surprising. Just a month earlier, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, had visited Cairo, and it would be fair to speculate that Naryshkin used his visit to promote the forum he held so dear to his heart.
This was, apparently, a straightforward exercise in lobbying, using a visit by the head of intelligence to get things done.
Lebanon, however, may have been a different story—one in which all the methods described above were brought into play.
At the end of last year, when Lebanon’s new ambassador to Moscow arrived in Russia, one of his first visits was to the offices of Metropolitan Antony of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations (DECR). The meeting took place even before he formally assumed his duties as ambassador in January — quite an unusual move for a newly arrived envoy. According to the official readout, they discussed relations between the Antiochian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, among other issues.
It is not entirely clear whether the forum will succeed in becoming a genuine alternative to Western security conferences. What is clear, however, is the demonstration of how Russia projects its influence abroad.
Even if, as in this case, the goal was to herd as many foreign officials as possible to a military park on the outskirts of Moscow and force them to sit through hours of anti-Western diatribes from Putin’s aging dignitaries.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
