Grievances in Russia-West Relations

ROPV offers an incomplete breakdown of the various grievances plaguing relations between Russia and the West, in particular the U.S., first from the Russian perspective, second from the U.S. perspective.

Russia’s Grievances with the West in the Post-Soviet Period

1990s

• NATO expansion beyond Germany into eastern European countries of the former Soviet bloc (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) in 1997- after the Reagan and US advisers indicated they would not do so in 1991 when Gorbachev agreed to toppling the Berlin wall.
• The U.S. rejection of Boris Yeltsin’s 1993 letter requesting Russian membership in NATO
• NATO expansion further into Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) as well as into former Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).
• The broken promise of economic assistance from the West during the 1992 depression
• The deep involvement of American advisors in designing Boris Yeltsin’s ineffective economic reforms and privatization program which resulted in the dissolution of average Russia’s entire savings, mass unemployment, and the enrichment of a small circle of bureaucrats and oligarchs
• The failure to repeal for Russia the Jackson-Vanik amendments limiting trade with the USSR because of Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration (that ended over 15 years ago).
• The deep involvement of the U.S. in Russia’s 1996 elections
• Washington’s inordinate focus on the quality of Russian democracy beginning in the 1990s as compared with limited pressure it put on truly authoritarian regimes like China, Saudi Arabia, etc.
• The NATO air campaign against Serbia, in support of Kosovo’s independence, that killed thousands of fellow Slavic citizens
• NATO plans to expand further into the former USSR, specifically to the Caucasus, specifically Georgia, which borders Russia’s separatist- and jihad-plagued North Caucasus as well as into fraternal Slavic Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population
• Western attempts to limit Russia’s influence over energy resources in the former Soviet space or Eurasia and their export to Europe
• Western, specifically U.S., dominance of international financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
• General issues of American overstepping in the post-Soviet or Eurasian region and elsewhere related to the U.S.’s status as the lone global superpower
• Western efforts to break up the CIS and the Organization Treaty on Collective Security that join together different former Soviet republics by backing GUAM, an organization of anti-Russian states at the time of its formation (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova).
• Western efforts to resist Transdnestr’s autonomy within Moldova
• Russia’s deep hope that it would be accepted into the community of free nations and systematically was rejected in the 90s

2000s

• Western stalling on Russia’s accession to the WTO, led by Poland and Georgia
• The US invasion of Iraq, which Russia warned against, not believing war logic
• U.S. and general Western support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• The U.S.’s alleged ‘clash of civilizations’ aimed at the Muslim, Orthodox, Eurasian and even Asian worlds.
• Western support for the secession of all of the former Soviet republics from the USSR, of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Macedonia, and Kosovo from Yugoslavia and Serbia, and, in some circles of Chechnya and other national republics from the Russian Federation.
• The above policies contrast sharply with a Western policy of denying secession for Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia
• Moral support for Chechen and other ethnic separatists and even Caucasus jihadists by organizations financed by the U.S. and other Western governments
• U.S. supportive position toward Russia’s oligarchs who had essentially stolen Russia’s major enterprises, particularly the courting and media support for Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
• Insinuating blame surrounding tragedies of Moscow residential bombings, Moscow Theatre disaster and Beslan school tragedy, rather than demonstrating grief and condolances
• The U.S. unilateral withdrawal from ABM treaty
• The U.S. plan to install an anti-missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic which it claims is a measure aimed at Iran and will be limited to 10 interceptors; a promise made on the background of the West’s repeated broken promises on NATO expansion and itself a breaking of Western promises not to station troops or military equipment on the territory of new NATO member-states
• U.S. rejection of then president Vladimir Putin’s proposal to place a cooperative ABM system in Azerbaijan and a new and more sophisticated "Voronezh"-type station under construction outside Armavir rather than in Eastern Europe and put it under joint NATO-Russian monitoring
• The placement of 5,000 NATO troops in Bulgaria and Rumania in violation of Western promises not to station troops or military equipment on the territory of new NATO member-states
• Making obsolete the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe by expanding NATO and thus increasing the number of NATO forces beyond the treaty’s limits. As a result, Russia suspended its observation of the CFE Treaty in 2007 and the west complained.
• Differences with Washington over how to proceed on strategic nuclear arms limitations, given unresolved differences over missile defense and the fact that the Soviet-American START treaty expires in 2009, and the 2002 Strategic Offensive Potential Treaty (SOP) expires in 2012
• Washington’s suggestions that the Putin administration is behind the murders of Alexander Litvinenko in London and journalists like Anna Politkovskaya
• The deep involvement of the U.S. in elections across the former Soviet Union coinciding with efforts to draw democratizing states into NATO
• The interference of Western, especially American NGOs in Russian internal politics
• Western government support for opposition figures like Gary Kasparov
• Western, including American asylum given to Chechen separatists and terrorists and their financiers, for example, Ilyas Akmedov in Washington and Akhmed Zakaev and Boris Berezovskii in London.
• The U.S., NATO, and Israeli equipping and training of the Georgian army under president Mikheil Saakashvili
• Saakashvili refused the “reject the use of force” offer and threatened use armed force to resolve the South Ossetian and Abkhazian ‘frozen conflicts’ on Russia’s borders

Western Grievances with Post-Soviet Russia

• Russia’s rollback of democracy, especially beginning in 2000 under President Vladimir Putin
• Russian human rights violation in both its post-Soviet Chechen wars and in the North Caucasus more generally
• Russia’s alleged neo-imperialism, in particular efforts to preserve a sphere of influence for itself in the region of the former Soviet Union or Eurasia
• Russia’s supply of nuclear technology to Iran
• Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion, especially to the post-Soviet space
• Russia’s alleged opposition to democratic regimes in the former USSR
• Russia’s use of its oil and gas pricing and supplies to European and former Soviet republics for political leverage
• Russia’s efforts to divide the U.S. and Europe over issues such as NATO expansion and European energy security vis-a-vis Russia
• Russia’s support for separatists in Transdnestr, Moldova and in Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia
• Russia’s stationing of troops in Georgia (withdrawn in 2006) and 900 troops in Transdnestr in violation for the now defunct CFE Treaty
• Russia’s support for a Transdnestr’s autonomy within a federated Moldova
• Russia’s suspension of its compliance with the CFE treaty
• Russia’s support for Hamas
• Russia’s sale of weapons to Iran, Syria and Venezuela
• Russia’s refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, suspected by British police in the murder of former KGB officer and Berezovskii ally Aleksandr Litvinenko
• Russia’s ban on food imports from Poland and earlier from Georgia
• Russia’s deportation of ethnic Georgian illegal immigrants in 2005
• Russia’s claim to natural resource deposits in the Arctic.
• Russia’s August 2008 incursion into Georgia after Georgia invaded

Comments

[Patrick Armstrong]

Excellent summary!
What I would add to the "Western grievances" section are:
The YUKOS prosecution which was seen in generally in the West as a Kremlin attempt to (illegally) seize a private business.
There have been a number of similar instances which are portrayed as Kremlin interference with businesses for political reasons. The Sakhalin project, the TNK-BP imbroglio, various food bans (like the present "Chicken war" with the USA), bans on Georgian wine, the change in the NGO law. While the Kremlin gives reasons for these, many in the West suspect that the reasons are merely convenient excuses for political pressure.
The actual justice and correctness of the Western point of view may be debatable, but these things are frequent entries in the "charge sheet" against Russia.

Personally, I think the key items that fed the present hostility were:

1. NATO expansion which is clearly aimed at taking in everyone except Russia.
2. The Kosovo war.
3. And, dare I say it, Western credulity about Georgia, which actually goes back 15 years.
4. The YUKOS prosecution
5. Russian recovery under Putin, who can be rather truculent, which is spun in various hostile ways.