Russia: Other Points of View

RUSSIAN FEDERATION WEEKLY REPORT

by Patrick Armstrong

Eurasian Union. Putin has spoken of his desire to form a “Eurasian Union” and this has attracted some attention. This is hardly the first time, though, that he has spoken of such a thing. We already have the Russia-Belarus union, which doesn’t seem to amount to much; the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, which is still in its infancy; the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation of Russia, four Central Asian countries and China and several partial members which is largely security-based. And, of course, the CIS which is as yet undead.  None of these is especially vibrant. Moscow and Astana have been the prime movers of most of them and they are founded on the remaining common economic/trade and security concerns of the countries involved. Perhaps the Customs Union will be expanded farther; that will depend on how successful it proves to be. There is, therefore, nothing especially new about Putin’s desires. However some things have changed in the 10 to 15 years that these ideas have been floated. The most significant change is that the attraction of the West/European “model” has waned somewhat. The dreams of acceptance, integration and equality that were alive in the 1990s have been replaced with a rather drearier reality. And the reality – unexpected 15 years ago – that Russia is doing best.

RETHINKING THE RESET

REPRINTS

Moscow Times, 01 July 2011

by Andrei Tsygankov

Since the reset button in U.S.-Russian relations has been pressed, Russia and the West have learned to cooperate on multiple issues from Iran and Afghanistan to nuclear arms control. Still, the momentum for improving Western ties with Russia seems to be caught in a holding pattern. It seems that both sides are increasingly frustrated with each other's policies.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently condemned Russia for its sharp reaction to NATO's plans for a missile defense system in Europe. The Kremlin threatened to develop new intercontinental ballistic missiles that could spark a new arms race. Clearly frustrated, Rasmussen chided Russia's outdated thinking. "We are not a threat to Russia, we will not attack Russia, we will not undermine the security of Russia," he said.
The Kremlin, however, maintains that NATO's missile defense plans could undermine Russia's security as soon as 2020, when the system's fourth phase will be deployed. Moscow is suspicious of the fact that in response to the concerns it voices, it only receives vague, rhetorical assurances and other brushoffs.

NATIONAL INTERESTS, CHAMPIONING DEMOCRACY, AND MSM DOUBLE STANDARDS

COMMENTARY

by Gordon Hahn

The U.S. mainstream media is fond not only of criticizing Russia’s soft (in my view) authoritarianism––but also is fond of cozying up to, and defending authoritarian regimes elsewhere.

To the point, a January 11, 2011 New York Times editorial titled “Lukashenko’s Gulag” castigated Moscow for supporting Belarus’s autocrat Alexander Lukashenko: “Mr. Lukashenko clearly thinks that his improving relations with Russia means he can thumb his nose at the West. The Kremlin, of course, said nothing about the stolen election and has enabled him with recent oil and gas agreements. Europe and the United States must now push back hard. There is little hope for democratic change in Belarus unless Mr. Lukashenko is forced to pay a stiff price for his abuses.”

But as the U.S. has been reminded recently in Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere, they too have been complicit in foreign authoritarian regimes, including by way ‘enabling them with oil and gas agreements.’  Parapharasing the NYT, substituting a few key words, highlights the hypocrisy: The U.S., of course, did nothing for decades about the repression of opposition in Saudi Arabia. It enabled the Wahhabi regime with recent oil and gas agreements. One can say the same about the repression of dissidents in China while enabling the communist regime with lucrative business ties.

VIDEO and TRANSCRIPT OF VLADIMIR PUTIN'S INTERVIEW WITH CNN's LARRY KING

Putin's interview with Larry King

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT as provided by the Russian prime minister's website

TIME TO REVISE RUSSIAN RESET POLICY?

ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Response to the Heritage Foundation "Time to Revise Obama's Russian "Reset" Policy" by Ariel Cohen, October 26, 2010

by Gordon Hahn 

The article reviewed below was written for the Heritage Foundation by Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., who is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Policy at the Katherine and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Policy at The Heritage Foundation.  Cohen regrets “U.S. concessions on New START, limitations on missile defense, and hands-off policies in Eurasia” because supposedly they “did not prevent Russia from pursuing policies that are often harmful to U.S. interests.”  He proposes a return to a hardline in U.S. policy towards Russia.  Our footnote commentaries assess the veracity, comprehensiveness, and practicality of the author’s policy critique and recommendations.

To access the full analysis, click Download Heritage_Cohen_26_Oct_2010

THE THIRD TURN

ROPV CONTRIBUTORS

by Patrick Armstrong

The hypothesis of this essay is that the conventional Western view of post-Communist Russia has passed through two cycles and is entering a third. While the first two were grounded mostly on what observers wished to see, the third is shaping up to be based more on reality.

Little Brother

As Tom Graham wisely observed some years ago: while no one will take seriously a country with a declining GDP, no one can ignore one whose GDP is rising. When the USSR fell apart in 1991, its extraordinarily centralised economy, whose links were now were blocked by new national borders, choked and died. Living standards sank, inflation exploded, the tax base collapsed, state employees went months without pay, factory employees were paid in kind, the social support system failed and the demographic decline that had begun in the Khrushchev period accelerated. All indicators worsened at once. This was the time when “free fall” was a favourite descriptor. A reminder of this period was a piece that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001, starkly entitled: “Russia is Finished.” Still available on the Net, it makes curious reading today.

REIMAGINING EURASIA

REPRINTS

An Opportunity to Reimagine Eurasia

By Samuel Charap, Alexandros Petersen

October 14, 2010

National Interest

Despite the smiles, hearty handshakes and declarations of partnership, President Obama’s meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in New York last month was actually a symptom of waning U.S. influence in Eurasia. And neither that encounter nor the recent visits to Baku by the secretaries of state and defense will accomplish much of anything in terms of advancing long-term U.S. interests until the administration comes up with a strategy for engaging the countries of the region.

The extraordinary high-level attention paid to Azerbaijan is a result of that country’s recent temper-tantrum approach to foreign policy. Due to a variety of snubs both imagined and real (in particular the decision not to engage Baku as the United States pursued normalization of relations between Azerbaijan’s archrival Armenia and its ally Turkey), Aliyev felt his country was being overlooked by the Obama administration. So he decided that the best way to get U.S. attention was to lash out, specifically by putting the screws on the Turks to scupper the Armenia rapprochement, cozying up to Moscow on energy deals and threatening to pull the plug on the overflight agreement that allows the U.S. military a crucial corridor to Afghanistan.

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ELECTIONS IN UKRAINE

COMMENTARY

Flying So High You Can’t See the Ground

By Patrick Armstrong

Ukrainians will be electing a new President on Sunday and, while we do not yet know who will win, we know that neither Yanukovych nor Tymoshenko is running on an overtly anti-Russia platform. Therefore, whoever wins, relations between Kiev and Moscow will likely be calmer than they have been since the “Orange Revolution” of 2004. Stratfor sees this in apocalyptic terms: “The next few months will therefore see the de facto folding of Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence” and “a new era of Russian aggressiveness” now begins The author goes on to talk about the Carpathians as a defence shield for Russia, Ukraine as Russia’s “breadbasket” and so on.

But who decided that this was the question that Ukrainian voters were answering? It was the “Orange Revolution” and its outside backers that injected into Ukrainian politics the binary choice of either joining the West or becoming Russia’s appendage: at no point was there support among the majority of Ukrainians for such a choice. And there is absolutely no reason to treat the recent election as having made such a choice. While Yushchenko was indeed the binary candidate: “either this pro-Kremlin couple and pro-Kremlin policy wins, or the pro-European policy does”, he and his view have been brutally rejected by the voters. No surprise, of course, to those who have been watching opinion polls in Ukraine.

WORKING WITH RUSSIA TO PREVENT EURASIAN COLLAPSE

REPRINTS

by Andrey Tsygankov

RFERL, Oct 29, 2009 

The Eurasian region continues to disintegrate, and neither Russia nor the West has been able to arrest the destabilizing dynamics.

Evidence of rising instability throughout the region include the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war, renewed terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus, the persistent failure of Western forces to stabilize Afghanistan, the inability of Central Asian rulers to reign in local clans and drug lords, and the paralysis of legitimately elected bodies of power in Ukraine and Moldova.

Violence is gradually spreading, waiting for an opportunity to erupt into a large-scale conflict. Transregional transportation routes may soon be choked due to Russia's conflicts with Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkmenistan.

The West's attempts to secure and stabilize Eurasia after the end of the Cold War must be recognized as a failure. In the mid-1990s, U.S. geostrategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski recommended that the United States pursue a policy of replacing Russia as the referee and protector of the newly established non-Russian states in the region. After initial hesitation, the United States and other Western states followed this advice.

Yet Eurasia has not become stable or peaceful and continues to disintegrate. The bureaucrats in Washington and Brussels have failed to understand that they lack the resources, the will, and the experience to stabilize the complex region. Today -- after the Iraq war and the global financial crisis -- the United States is beginning to recognize its overextension, but it is not at all clear if Washington and Brussels are prepared to act differently in Eurasia.

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