Flush with oil and gas revenues and buoyed by its presidency of the Group of Eight, Russia is becoming a significant player -- and competitor with the United States -- in the Middle East for the first time since the Soviet crash of 1991.

The latest sign of President Vladimir Putin's drive to reestablish Russian clout was the announcement during his flying visit to Algeria on Friday of weapons sales worth 7.5 billion dollars (6.3 billion euros). Russia also agreed to cancel Algeria's Soviet-era debt.

Weapons are one of Russia's few internationally competitive products. In 2005 the export agency Rosoboronexport announced its best sales for years at 6.1 billion dollars, mostly to China, India and former Soviet client states in the Muslim world and Asia.

But Moscow's simultaneous writing off of 4.7 billion dollars of debt reveals the political nature of the arms trade, analysts said.

"There has never been a deal like that in the history of Russian military-industrial partnerships," the Kommersant business daily said on Saturday. It suggested that the real value of contracts might not have been more than 5.5 billion dollars.

"This visit was part of Russia's general policy in the Middle East," Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, told AFP on Friday.

"Russia is coming back. The geopolitical strategy has changed. The rapprochment with the West is over and Russia is taking its own route."

That new strategy -- kick-started in April 2005 when Putin became the first Kremlin leader to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories -- coincides with a distinct cooling of relations between Moscow and Washington.

But Russia presents itself less as a competitor than an East-West middleman.

As builder of Iran's sole civilian nuclear power plant, Moscow says it can help resolve Tehran's standoff with the international community over a suspected secret weapons programme. In the only compromise plan on the table, Russia would assume responsibility for Iran's uranium enrichment.

Russia also ignored Israeli and Western suspicion at the start of March to hold talks with Hamas, arguing that the militant group, which is now the ruling party in the Palestinian territories, should be engaged, not made a pariah.

Another Western bugbear -- Syria -- will be allowed into Russia's diplomatic limelight this week when Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem meet in Moscow.

Russia has been at odds with European powers and the United States over how to ensure Syria's cooperation with a UN probe into suspicions of Syrian links to the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.

Russia wants Syrian cooperation, Lavrov said ahead of the Moscow talks, but not for the issue to be used for "political means". All these initiatives add up to a bold but risky policy that could leave Russia isolated, Malashenko warned.

"It's important these initiatives bring results, because otherwise they will boomerang on Russia," he said.

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