The Russian leader gifted Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi with a Russian-made AK-47 rifle as the stoic leader landed in Cairo for his first visit to the country in more than a decade.
El-Sissi looked on and smiled as Putin opened the cushioned gun case and hefted the assault weapon during his two-day visit to the Middle Eastern nation.
The two countries last year signed a deal for some $3.5 billion worth of weapons, including air-defense systems, artillery and smaller arms, Bloomberg News reported.
The AK-47 — Automatic Kalashnikov — is symbolic to Russia as the easy-to-use, low-cost weapon was made standard issue in the Soviet Army in 1949. The sturdy weapon’s Russian inventor, Mikhail Kalashnikov, died in 2013 at age 94.
Putin’s largely symbolic visit is meant to strengthen trade and military agreements between the two nations. The Egyptian capital prepared for his visit by lining the streets with flags bearing photos of a smirking Putin. And the state-run Egyptian newspaper, Al Ahram, ran a profile of the Russian strongman posing shirtless and holding various below the headline, “A hero of our times.”
The two leaders planned to pal around at the Cairo Opera House, where the symphony planned to play snippets of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”
The countries were close in the 1950s and ‘60s under the rule of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who spurned the U.S. in favor of the Soviets.
“For Egypt, the exceptionally warm reception for Putin is purposeful theatrics, meant as a message to the U.S. and the West that Egypt maintains a sense of independence, has options and is not beholden,” Michael Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told The Associated Press.
Putin faces troubles at home, where the crisis in Ukraine has reached a fever pitch resulting in a truce summit Wednesday in Belarus. The Russian leader has been condemned by much of the world for sending troops and supporting separatists in autonomous Ukraine, a former Soviet republic.
Egypt, and specifically el-Sissi, has faced mounting pressure from the United States, which provides $1.3 billion annually to the country in military aid. El-Sissi has cracked down on dissent in the nation, where the Arab Spring raged in 2011, after he came to power in 2013.
“This isn’t about trade and economy, no — that doesn’t require a Russian president going to Egypt,” Georgy Mirsky, a professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, told the AP of Putin’s visit. “For Putin, it’s a way to show his people that Russia is not a pariah in the world, that it’s not isolated. … And this is one small step. Egypt knows that it can’t live without the West, because it needs investment, and it needs money and all kinds of economic aid. Russia is by no means in a position to help Egypt on those fronts, it is in a very bad way itself, and things will certainly get worse before they get better.”
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