The Vostok-2018 war games in eastern Siberia last month marked Russia’s biggest military exercise in more than 30 years, with about 300,000 Russian, Chinese and Mongolian troops taking part.

More than just an exercise, the war games were a public relations opportunity to showcase military hardware, Russia’s second-biggest source of income after oil.

During Vostok-2018, Russia showed off the S-400 surface-to-air missile, one of the country’s most advanced and marketable weapons systems in recent years.

The S-400 is a massive upgrade to the S-300, its predecessor which was recently sent to Syria.

Because of its capabilities, several countries including China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India and Qatar have said they are willing to buy the S-400.

Almost every government that announced it was planning to buy the system was threatened with some kind of diplomatic retaliation from the US, NATO or adversaries.

The reason for this blowback, according to several experts Al Jazeera interviewed, is not only because the S-400 is technologically advanced, it also poses a potential risk for long-standing alliances.

“The S-400 is among the most advanced air defence systems available, on par with the best the West has to offer,” said Siemon Wezeman, senior researcher with Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) arms transfers and military expenditure programme.

“Its radars and other sensors, as well as its missiles, cover an extensive area – the radar has a range of at least 600km for surveillance, and its missiles have ranges of up to 400km,” Wezeman told Al Jazeera.

“It’s precise and it manages to track a very large number of potential targets, including stealth targets.”

Other advantages are its modular setup and high mobility, meaning it can be set up, fired and moved within minutes.

The S-400 is among the most advanced air defence systems available, on par with the best the West has to offer.

Siemon Wezeman, SIPRI

“It’s intended to be a one-size-fits-all missile system. It can be configured with long-range, semi long-range, medium-range and even short-range weapons systems, depending on how the individual user wishes to configure the S-400,” Kevin Brand, military analyst working with the Council on Foreign Relations, told Al Jazeera.

“It’s very rugged, it’s adaptable and it’s a road-mobile system, something many countries are seeking to evolve to.”

Turkey, a NATO member, is one of the most significant potential buyers of the S-400.

Speaking at a graduation ceremony for military officers, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in August that Ankara would try to procure the missile system as soon as possible, which according to Russia will be in 2019.

But Turkey’s interest in the Russian missile system spooked its Western NATO allies, for technical and political reasons.

“In the technological sense, the S-400 would certainly be a step forward [for Turkey], but it’s not necessarily in the best interest of NATO to have that weapons system integrated within its broader architecture,” Brand said.

The S-400 could lead to a potentially dangerous situation, Brand explained.

“When you look at the Russian S-400 system, especially in a NATO structure, there’s a scale of difficulty when integrating it into the bigger defence system,” Brand told Al Jazeera.

“If you take it as a very benign situation, the simplest scenario is that its data might not be able to be incorporated into the defensive architecture that is currently used by NATO. That’s probably the best worst-case scenario.”

NATO relies heavily on several systems working together in a larger network.

“[Adding the S-400] might complicate the picture, it might pollute the view that bigger system is giving you.”

There is added the risk that Russia has ill intentions, Brand said.

“What kind of contracts would be in place with Russian technicians taking care of the S-400, for example, would Russian maintenance personnel have access to [NATO] data? 

“The worst-case scenario is that there might be vulnerabilities associated with that system that could be exploited by a potential adversary.

“Plugging it in could potentially actively compromise your own defensive network.”

For India, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are not part of an alliance such as NATO, buying a system like the S-400 would lead to fewer technological issues, but they could risk diplomatic and economic repercussions from the US.

In 2017, the US implemented the Countering America’s Adversaries Sanctions Act (CAATSA) in a response to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections and military involvement in both Ukraine and Syria.

CAATSA allows the US to act against individuals, companies or countries that are “disturbing international security”.

The US is looking to isolate Russia following on from the events in Ukraine and beyond

Charles Forresters, Jane’s by IHS Markit

The US Department of State has said Chinese purchases of SU-35 aircraft and S-400 surface-to-air missiles breached the CAATSA, only weeks after it said India might be subject to sanctions if it continues with purchasing the system. 

However, India decided earlier this week to buy the weapons system.

“India places top priority on ties with Russia. In today’s fast-changing world, our relationship assumes heightened importance,” India Prime Minister Narendra Moditold Russia President Vladimir Putin after they signed the $5bn deal.

According to SIPRI’s Wezeman, the chances of the US following through on its threats of sanctions are slim, especially for countries like India or Saudi Arabia.

“The sanctions are not automatic and exemptions are possible if in the national interest of the US,” he said.

“Sanctions are actually unlikely as India and others are too important as military and political partners for the US. Even limited sanctions would probably make those countries quite angry – angry enough to hurt US interests.”

But even if economic sanctions are unlikely, upsetting the US could lead to a diplomatic spat.

“There is also a diplomatic issue here, as the agreement to sell sensitive technology to a country implies a wider alignment of a range of political issues, and that is why the US is looking to isolate Russia following on from the events in Ukraine and beyond,” Charles Forrester, senior defence industry analyst at Jane’s by IHS Markit told Al Jazeera.

For the US, these purchases form more than just a military threat – they are about countering Russia’s involvement in global conflicts, but also about maintaining long-standing US diplomatic relations and preventing Russia receiving hard currency for its equipment, analysts said. 

India also has a long-standing relationship as far as buying hardware from Russia, so they have a lot of experience with this equipment.

Kevin Brand, Council on Foreign Relations

“The US has been working at finding ways to strengthen its diplomatic responses on the world stage to countries that violate the global rules-based order,” Forrester said.

So why would Turkey, India or any other country risk diplomatic relations with the US?

“India does not like to necessarily buy from one vendor and be overly dependent on one country, so from an Indian perspective geopolitically it does make sense to buy some systems from Russia and some from the US,” Brand said.

“India also has a long-standing relationship as far as buying hardware from Russia, so they have a lot of experience with this equipment.”

Another motive is sharing military technology, something the US is not eager to do, unlike to Russia. 

“Russia is willing to supply S-400 to probably about anyone and to share technology to some extent,” Wezeman explained, although he added that it is unclear how far this sharing would go.

And for Turkey especially, Wezeman said, the S-400 has become something of a vanity project.

“Not bowing to the US and NATO shows that Turkey is its own boss; that it can take on the US and NATO,” Wezeman said.

Palu, Indonesia – Ayir! Ayir! People screamed in horror, pointing to the wall of water barreling towards Palu, just minutes after a 7.5-magnitude quake struck the central Sulawesi city on September 28.

The water advanced like a speeding train and roared like thunder. Then waves as high as six metres slammed the coast with force that ripped out trees, flattened buildings, and swept many to their death.

That Friday, Satna, 52, and her 31-year-old daughter Herne were at their usual spot by the eastern foot of the city’s yellow arched bridge, Ponulele. For a year, they had been selling the chicken and coconut milk delicacy, utatadah, and some beverages from a bamboo stall by the sea. A paragliding event and cultural festival was scheduled that weekend, so heavy foot traffic was expected.

Maghrib prayer had just begun, and the last ray of the sun was still peeking through the Gawalise mountain range that looms more than 2,000 metres over the city of 350,000 people. The sky was clear and the wind was blowing comfortably. At 27 degrees Celsius, it was just perfect for the festivities that night.

Then the earth started rocking back and forth.  

The violence of the tremor quickly triggered a tsunami. An earthquake-related phenomenon called liquefaction also followed, turning the ground into rampaging mud burying whole villages and their residents. Banjir lumpur, a flood of mud, locals referred to it with dread. Pockets of fire around the city were also reported.  

As of Monday, at least 1,944 people were reported killed, more than 2,549 injured, and an undetermined number still missing – perhaps as many as 5,000, according to some estimates. A fifth of the city’s population has also been displaced.  

‘Water! Water!’

The fierceness and scale of the disaster had many survivors in disbelief how they cheated death. Some still shuddered at the thought of that fateful day, while wondering how they would recover from their trauma. Others have shown resiliency.

When they felt the jolt, the first instinct of mother and daughter, Herne and Satna, was to get up and run like the others. Satna injured her right arm after falling three times, while running with Herne, as the ground continued to sway underneath them. They said that during the tremor the soil cracked, and fountains of water started bursting out.

In fear, they rushed towards the bridge, the nearest higher ground. But they could not move further. The deck of the bridge had collapsed in the earthquake, its two yellow arches twisted and toppled to one side.

Suddenly, they heard people screaming, “Water! Water!” When they turned towards the sea, they saw the roaring waves. What they did not know was how high it would be. When a tsunami nears land, it starts to slows down, but it also increases in height as its largest waves crest.  

“This must be what Apocalypse looks like,” Herne thought to herself, recalling the moment to Al Jazeera.

With her left arm, Herne wrapped her mother in an embrace, while locking her right arm as mightily as she could to the bridge railing. Her mother also held on tight to the steel. They were partly protected by the concrete parapet, a low thick wall along the edge of the bridge.

The torrent of water reached the bridge’s abutment, smashing those who sought shelter there even though it was almost two storeys high. Herne and Satna turned away as the water hit them. At one point both recalled being underwater, with the current threatening to drag them away.

“I could not tell you how much saltwater I swallowed,” Satna told Al Jazeera. “It really felt like it was the end of the world.” 

When the waves receded, some of the people who fled with Satna and Herne to the bridge were gone. Further down, they saw bodies, some floating in knee-high water. As darkness fell, they fled from the coast drenched and barefoot.  

Districts swallowed

As the tsunami was happening on Palu’s coast, floods of mud were swallowing up buildings and residents in at least two districts of the city called Balaroa and Petobo. Soil liquefaction happens when the soil is saturated with water, turning it into mud, as a result of intense underground shaking.

Inside their home in Petobo, high school student Pragati Wira Nur Sabina just finished her ablution, the ceremonial act of washing before Muslim prayers, for sunset worship. She had just arrived from school. Pragati’s 17-year-old brother, Muhammad Sultan Prakas, was in the living room.

Pragati, 15, said shortly after the earthquake she heard roaring sounds outside. As she and her brother ran out, the walls of their home buckled.

She watched with dread as houses in her neighbourhood tumbled, swept by the flowing mud.

“It looks like a wave in the ocean,” Pragati told Al Jazeera, adding she saw other people running away in horror, shouting their plea to God.

“It sounded like thunder when the houses were crashing on top of each other,” she said. “I just kept on running because the ground was also moving fast towards me.”

“I felt like the ground was chasing after me like a mad dog, because it won’t stop moving,” she said, staring blankly as she recalled her ordeal.

The home Pragati’s parents built was left in ruins, and under the mud. It was also uprooted from its original location, and was shifted 300 metres away, Pragati’s father, Amirudin, told Al Jazeera. Amirudin, a member of Indonesia’s military, and his wife, were not home when the disaster struck.

According to authorities, about 1,700 houses were destroyed by liquefaction. The number of casualties remain unknown as some victims are feared to be buried deep under the mud and mountain of debris.

On Sunday, Indonesia’s disaster management agency announced the government will stop searching for the dead on October 11. The local government also announced that people affected in those areas will be relocated.

‘Psychological first aid’

As the affected areas begin the recovery phase, it is important that the government not only address basic services and infrastructure, but also the psychological impact of the disaster on survivors, Selina Sumbung, head of Save the Children in Indonesia, told Al Jazeera.

“In tragic events such as this, the emotional and psychological impact is very big,” she said, adding children are the most vulnerable among the survivors.

“So we focus on providing psychological first aid on them.”

Having their homes destroyed and losing family members, many children are struggling to cope with the aftermath of the disaster, Sumbung said, as she appealed for more financial aid.

Save the Children is also helping parents and primary caregivers who have lost their children during the quake.

Faizah is among those who lost a child. Her granddaughter, Hanaya, went missing when the tsunami struck Palu’s coast. She and her daughter, Fauziah, were seen looking distraught, as they roamed around a Palu park carrying Hanaya’s photo, pleading anyone for help. Faizah and Fauziah had been taking care of Hanaya, whose mother died during childbirth.

The national and local government has also set up trauma centres in Palu. But for most of the survivors, they are left to look after themselves.

Satna and Herne, the food vendors who survived the tsunami, have decided to leave Palu with their entire family, and settle temporarily in Surabaya, in East Java, to try to cope with their nightmare.

“I still don’t know how we survived. When the waves were about to hit us, I just prayed, ‘It’s all up to you, oh God’,” Satna said, as they sat at the Palu airport on Saturday, waiting for their flight.

Three days after the disaster, Herne went back to the Ponulele bridge to size up the damage. She told Al Jazeera it was also her way of trying to rid the nightmare experience from her mind.

Standing at the edge of the collapsed bridge, Herne said she shouted at the top of her voice, “I’m still alive! I beat you out tsunami!”

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – To detractors, he’s a dangerous cheerleader of dictatorship. To supporters, he’s the presidential candidate capable of delivering salvation from Brazil’s political, social and economic crises.

Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right firebrand and self-styled political outsider, is divisive.

He’s also just one election win away from potentially becoming the next leader of Latin America’s largest democracy.

On October 28, he will face fellow candidate Fernando Haddad, of the leftist Worker’s Party (PT), in a head-to-head ballot for Brazil’s presidency.

Last month he suggested that he would not accept the result if he did not win the election. His running mate, former army general Hamilton Mourao, later walked back those comments.

Remarkable rise

Bolsonaro won a place in the runoff after topping a field of 13 candidates during a first-round vote on October 7 with 47 percent of the vote.

The result marked a high point in the 63-year-old’s remarkable recent rise after decades of relative political obscurity.

Bolsonaro has served as a congressman for Rio de Janeiro in Brazil’s lower house Chamber of Deputies since 1991, switching parties on numerous occasions.

He was hardly known outside the city until 2014, when Brazil slid towards the malaise it now finds itself in.

“He was always an unimpressive backbencher, he was never a party boss … or had a programmatic agenda that was of any significance,” Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations at the Brazil-based Getulio Vargas Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

“Until four years ago, Bolsonaro was not a household name in Brazilian politics.”

Seizing on crises

According to political analysts, critical to Bolsonaro’s emergence was the convergence of several different crises within Brazil, which have slashed public faith in democracy and the country’s political class.

“The overall discreditment of establishment politicians resulting from the worst recession in 100 years, the biggest corruption scandal ever detected – according to the US Department of Justice – and this never ending deterioration in crime and homicide have caused the rise of Bolsonaro,” said Brian Winter, vice president of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas and editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly.

More than 12 percent of Brazilians are jobless, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, with the economy still struggling to recover from a seismic recession that dragged on for more than two years before officially ending in 2017.

Amid the downturn, several high-level corruption scandals erupted at the height of which was a major anti-graft probe known as Lava Jato, or Car Wash.

Since 2014, more than 150 Brazilian business leaders, corporations and politicians have been prosecuted – including former president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva – as part of the investigation and other interlocking probes.

“The corruption scandals linked to Lava Jato are really quite revolutionary in Brazil, there’s never [before] been this range of action against politicians, public officials and businesspeople… It’s really shaken the establishment,” Richard Lapper, an independent analyst and commentator on Latin American politics, told Al Jazeera.

“[And] Bolsonaro has identified with this move against corrupt politicians,” he added.

“His great success is that he’s been able to mobilise outside of the political system against traditional politicians. He’s used social media very effectively and so he’s capitalising on the mood that’s anti-political in Brazil.” 

Crime and security

While Bolsonaro has tapped into widespread discontent with the economy and political elites, he’s also played on fundamental fears about security amid widespread violent crime.

Violence has surged in many parts of Brazil, home to seven of the world’s 20 most violent cities, in recent years.

Last year, homicides rose to a record high figure of 63,880, up 2.9 percent from 2016, according to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security.

“Crime is a major popular concern … and it is an issue across the country, which affects all social classes, although the poor most,” Spektor said.

“One of the reasons why Bolsonaro is leading the polls is that he has a message on crime and Haddad doesn’t.” 

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has pledged to tackle the security crisis by militarising the police, cracking down on criminal offenders by allowing officers greater freedom to kill, and loosening public gun laws.

His proposals are unlikely to prove successful, however, according to Spektor.

“The solutions he is offering have been shown to have no effect on troubling crime, on the contrary the notion that a tough hand on crime works has been proven incorrect by existing evidence,” he said.

“What there is evidence of is that the further militarisation of police increases very dramatically the number of homicides and killings.”

In Rio, Bolsonaro’s electoral stronghold, a military takeover of policing since February in response to acute violence throughout the city has coincided with a rise in homicide rates compared with the same period last year.

Style not substance

According to Lapper, Bolsonaro’s appeal isn’t driven by well considered policy ideas but rather his ability to present “simple answers to complex problems”, regardless of their efficacy.

In his more than two decades in congress, Bolsonaro has only had two of his own bills passed into law, despite having proposed about 170 pieces of legislation.

Allesandra Maia Terra de Faria, a professor of social science at the Rio-based Pontifical Catholic University, said Bolsonaro’s strategy has never been about having “a clear plan, or any kind of stability”.

“He’s always got one phrase to sum up everything, but which also means nothing,” de Faria said.

This rhetoric, however, has enabled him to unite various voting blocs within the Brazilian right, according to Lapper.

“There are three bits of the right in Brazil: the nostalgia right, who yearn for the security of the military dictatorship, the social right which is linked to this very big evangelical community in Brazil, and a liberal right who are always railing about the hypertrophy of the Brazilian state,” he said.

“All these things have come together in Bolsonaro, which I think makes his candidacy quite strong.” 

Rejection and resistance

But while Bolsonaro’s bid for office has found favour among some portion of the electorate, his candidacy has also been met with forceful resistance from others.

He consistently had the highest rejection rate of any candidate in the build-up to the first round of the vote and, according to Datafolha polling institute, about 44 percent of voters say they would not support him under any circumstances. Haddad’s rejection rate stood at about 40 percent before the October 7 election.  

The resistance to Bolsonaro has been driven by his numerous discriminatory comments on race, gender and sexual orientation, as well as remarks in favour of torture and Brazil’s former military dictatorship, in power from 1964 to 1985, which have angered and alarmed millions of Brazilians.

Bolsonaro has described having a daughter as a “weakness”, told a congresswoman she was “too ugly” to be raped, claimed some black people were not “even good for procreation”, and said he would rather one of his four sons “die in an accident” than be gay.

Last month he was stabbed while campaigning in the city of Juiz de Fora, in southeastern Minais Gerais state.

His suspected assailant told authorities he had been “ordered by god” to carry out the attack.

On September 29, hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities throughout Brazil as part of the social media driven and women-led #EleNao (#NotHim) protest against his candidacy.

“We have a society in transition and he represents everything that is old and more conservative in Brazil,” de Faria said.

“This is the saddest thing about Bolsonaro.”