A
museum installation by Russian artist Vasily Slonov, with flyswatters
depicting Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama, Krasnoyarsk, Russia, 25 October
2012
By Amy Knight
Are we playing Vladimir Putin’s game? On Friday, amid what may be the
worst confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban
missile affair, the Russian president put in a surprise call to
President Obama. The purpose of the call, apparently, was to raise the
possibility of a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis, though it
remains unclear whether Putin wants to negotiate with the West or was
just trying to ascertain Obama’s level of concern about further Russian
encroachments on Ukraine—and possibly neighboring Moldova. Whatever the
case, the White House seems to have been caught completely off-guard by
Putin’s call, just as it was by Russia’s military take-over of Crimea
last month.
There are now upwards of 30,000 Russian troops—some US estimates have
run as high as 50,000—poised on Russia’s border with Eastern Ukraine
(ostensibly for routine military exercises) and Putin spokesmen have
been claiming ominously that ethnic Russians on the other side are being
attacked by Ukrainian extremists. Putin reportedly repeated these
claims to Obama, adding that similar violence was occurring in
Transdniestria, a breakaway region of Moldova that borders Ukraine and
is the home of a large Russian population. Over the past few days, US
intelligence officials and Western analysts have warned of the
possibility of Russian actions in both eastern Ukraine and
Transdniestria.
Washington has described these threats as a radical shift in Russia’s
relations with the West—a situation almost unimaginable as recently as
early February, when Russia hosted the Sochi Olympics. In a lengthy op-ed piece in The New York Times
last Sunday, Michael McFaul, President Obama’s former Ambassador to
Moscow, asserted that Putin’s decision to annex the Crimea “ended the
post-Cold War era in Europe,” an era he characterized by “an underlying
sense that Russia was gradually joining the international order.”
But to anyone who has followed the Kremlin’s actions closely over the
years, none of this should come as a great surprise. To the contrary,
the recent events bear out longstanding policy aims of the Putin regime,
whose senior members have changed remarkably little since Putin became
president in 2000: for years, the Kremlin has worked to roll back US and
European influence in post-Soviet states, and to rebuild its own
suzerainty over like-minded regimes from Ukraine and Belarus to the
Caucasus and Central Asia. Failure to recognize how deeply engrained
these aims are, and how seemingly immune they have been to Western
overtures, has severely undermined US efforts to address challenges from
Russia effectively.
The Obama White House has exhibited a misguided optimism about
Kremlin intentions ever since the introduction of the “reset” with
Russia in 2009, which was intended to inaugurate a new era in US-Russia
relations, following the cooling off that had occurred after the Russian
invasion of Georgia in August of 2008. The new rapport, which Obama
pursued with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev (Putin was at the
time Prime Minister) was based on pragmatism and deal-making, rather
than attempts to promote American values. The chief architect of the
reset was McFaul, who served as Obama’s advisor on Russia in the
National Security Council from 2008 to 2012 before becoming ambassador
to Moscow, a post he has just vacated.
As McFaul and other Obama administration officials portray it, apart
from a few hiccups like the 2008 invasion of Georgia, Moscow has spent
much of the Putin years integrating itself with the West. Thus, they
argue, after 9/11, the Russian government cooperated with the US on
counter-terrorism; it allowed American military flights to Afghanistan
to traverse Russian airspace; and it developed economic and energy ties
with Europe. Since the “reset,” they maintain, Russia helped pressure
Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program; it joined the World
Trade Organization; and, until 2012, had in Medvedev a “moderate” in the
Kremlin under whom—in McFaul’s words—the “policy of engagement and
integration…appeared to be working again.” In recent months, Washington
has also credited Russia with brokering a deal with Syrian President
Assad to dismantle his chemical weapons program.
In fact, hardly any of these purported achievements holds up to
scrutiny. Russia used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to pursue
its brutal suppression of Chechnya and expand its unaccountable security
state, a process which, as I have noted,
continues to this day. It has persisted in arms sales to Iran and
provided crucial military hardware, along with diplomatic support, to
the Assad regime in Syria. Regarding the Afghan conflict, it has long
pressured Kyrgyzstan to expel the US from Manas air base—a crucial
supply link for allied forces—which will in fact be closed this summer.
And while the US has been distracted with wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Moscow has stepped up it aggressive efforts to establish a
“Eurasian Union” with post-Soviet states like Belarus, Kazakhstan,
Moldova, and most recently Ukraine, with the goal of creating a series
of pro-Kremlin governments and re-establishing its hegemony in the
region. Rather than an aberration, the 2008 invasion of Georgia was a
clear part of this long-running strategy, just as Russia’s continuing
moves in Ukraine are an extension of longstanding efforts to prevent the
country from moving closer to the West—efforts stepped up considerably
after the Orange Revolution in 2004.
Nor has the Kremlin made much progress in adopting western standards
of rule of law at home. Though the Obama administration championed
Russia’s entry into the WTO during Medvedev’s presidency, Medvedev never
achieved the substantial political or economic reforms he talked about
and continued to be a pawn of Putin, without an independent power base.
This became all too clear when Putin announced in September 2011 that he
would be replacing Medvedev as the Russian president in 2012.
And with the West mostly looking the other way, the Russian
government has been consistently ruthless in crushing political dissent.
As long ago as 2003, Putin put oligarch Dmitry Khodorkovsky, in prison
for supporting a political party that posed an alternative to Putin’s
United Russia. And the Kremlin has been relentless in its efforts to
silence Alexey Nalvny, the opposition blogger who has exposed widespread
corruption among Putin’s circle. Some of these persecutions continued, largely unnoticed, even as the world was watching this winter’s Olympics in Sochi.
To be sure, the White House inherited the perception that the Kremlin
was moving toward the West in part from George W. Bush, who famously
declared that he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw “his soul” (presumably
that of a nascent democrat). But did it really take Russia’s invasion
of Crimea for the White House to finally realize that Putin is an
authoritarian hegemon who has long been moving away from Europe and
building Russia’s domination of its “near abroad?” McFaul tells us that
“Mr. Putin’s own thinking has changed over time,” and that, with Crimea,
“Mr. Putin has made a strategic pivot.” But the Russian president has
not veered from the course he set out on as far back as 1999, when as
prime minister he made the decision to unleash a crippling war on the
republic of Chechnya. As Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian analyst and editor
of the quarterly journal Russia in Global Affairs, recently observed:
While McFaul eventually mastered diplomatic protocol, he had no power over the turn of events in Russian politics and bilateral relations. The circumstances when he was appointed ambassador to Russia changed completely by the time he had arrived….McFaul’s ambassadorship was the symbolic end of the era when America believed it could influence Russia’s trajectory.
It may be unfair to blame the Obama administration for
being caught by surprise by Russia’s Crimea grab, which many experts
failed to predict (though The Wall Street Journal has reported
that US intelligence agencies had indications that Putin might be
planning a military takeover of Crimea as far back as December). But it
is dismaying to consider that the White House remains under the delusion
that Russia’s actions mark a sudden departure from past practices.
The US and its European allies seem to have accepted Moscow’s
annexation of Crimea as a fait accompli because there is little they can
do to force it to take the humiliating step of withdrawing from the
region. The goal now is to prevent Russia from further incursions into
Ukraine, particularly the east and southeast areas of the country, where
many ethnic Russians live.
There are many reasons why such an intervention would be inadvisable
for the Kremlin. As Swedish economist Anders Aslund pointed out Tuesday
in the Moscow Times, Russia can ill afford the economic damage
already caused by its military aggression in the Crimea, which he
estimates at one to two percent of GDP for 2014. Stock prices have
fallen, along with the value of the ruble, and investors, both Russian
and foreign have begun withdrawing their investments from the county.
Meeting in Brussels this week, President Obama and other Western leaders
have suspended Russia from the Group of Eight and declared their
intention to introduce further, as yet unspecified, economic sanctions
against Russia if it takes military action in mainland Ukraine.
Yet by failing to recognize Moscow’s larger regional aims, the West
may be underestimating the Kremlin’s readiness to take advantage of a
situation that has offered new opportunities to exert its influence, and
that has played well at home. In recent weeks, Putin’s inner circle of siloviki
from his hometown of St. Petersburg, several of whom have been targeted
by the new US sanctions imposed this month, have closed ranks around
their leader. And polls show that, among the Russian population at
large, Putin’s popularity is at a new high. (Russians typically rally
around their leader when their military forces are deployed, as they did
in the past during the conflicts with Chechnya and Georgia.)
To prevent further Russian aggression, the United States and its
European allies should be prepared to inflict broad sanctions against
the Kremlin’s energy and financial sectors, rather than only against
certain Russian officials. But Western leaders may also need to take a
larger strategic view of the situation and shore up NATO military
defenses in the Baltic states and Poland, while giving more robust
support to democrats in Kiev and other vulnerable governments in the
region.
During a news conference early this week in Brussels, Obama responded
to those who claim he has been naïve about Putin by dismissing Russia
as a “regional power” that poses no risk to the security of the United
States. But this assessment seems more like a justification for allowing
the Kremlin to call the shots than a true statement of reality. A
Russian demarche into eastern Ukraine, and possibly Moldova, would
threaten the security of all the newly independent states of Europe and,
by implication, that of the US as well. The Kremlin can only be
deterred if the West, recognizing that Putin’s main goal is to project
Russia’s power and influence upon the former Soviet empire, begins to
anticipate Kremlin threats with resolute engagement of its own. As a
report from the Carnegie Moscow Center observed:
“For the rest of the world, dealing with Russia in the next few years
will mean dealing directly with Vladimir Putin, and it will not be
easy.”
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