Since then, Putin and other Russian leaders, including the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, claim that Russia “is, to some extent, a part of the Muslim world.” In an interview with Al Jazeera on Oct. 16, 2003, Putin stressed that, unlike Muslims living in Western Europe, those in Russia were indigenous, and that Islam had been present on Russian territory long before Christianity. So Russia now claims to have a privileged political relationship with the Arab and Muslim world and believes that, as a mostly European state, it has a historic vocation as a mediator between the Western and Muslim worlds.
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