Le Temps
Tuesday 14 August 2007
Muscovite editorialist Fyodor Lukyanov is convinced that one must go back to the 1970s to find such confidence among the Kremlin elite. That was in the middle of the Cold War, at a time when the United States considered the Soviet Union to be its alter ego. After seven years in power and close to 50 percent cumulative economic growth over that period, Vladimir Putin enjoys the stature and ambition of a tsar. He multiplies grand gestures as he pushes his scientists to explore the Arctic's marine depths or denounces the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty.
He succeeds in erasing the humiliation Russia has undergone since the collapse of the Soviet Empire by returning his country to the center of the global chessboard. After the American Neoconservative Utopia of the democratization of the Middle East, Russia's reemergence shows the United States the degree to which taking cultural values into account in foreign policy is essential. By pushing NATO's eastward extension or the installation of an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic at the double quick, the White House has uselessly wounded the Russian soul.
Today, Moscow is tempted by a certain revanchism. One thinks of its systematic veto against Kosovo's independence. Nonetheless, Putin's February speech in Munich allows us to believe in the Russian president's desire to cooperate. As Henry Kissinger says, Russian-American cooperation could help in confronting the planet's security challenges.
The Russian reawakening must nonetheless not make us forget the shadow zones of the Putin regime. The mysterious murders of ex-secret service agent Alexander Litvinenko with polonium and of journalist Anna Politkovskaya give rise to fears of obscure control by the Siloviki, the former and present members of the security services, over the progress of events. As for the Russian economy, it's blazing. But nothing says that the state capitalism practiced by Moscow and based on the illusion of technological quasi-self-sufficiency will allow the Kremlin to maintain the same self-confidence in the long term.
When Russia Bares Its Teeth
By Stéphane Bussard
Le Temps
Tuesday 14 August 2007
A day no longer goes by that Russia does not assert its power. To impose respect and repair the humiliations of the Yeltsin years, how far is Vladimir Putin prepared to go?
"Ten years ago, such an event would have been impossible." Wellesley University Professor Marshall Goldman, who has on several occasions met with Michael Gorbatchev, Boris Yeltsin and, more recently, Vladimir Putin, refers to the Russian expedition at the beginning of August. Scientists sent by the Kremlin plunged more than 4,000 meters into the Arctic Ocean to plant a Russian flag there. Sovereignty over this site abounding in hydrocarbons is contested between Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway. From a technological point of view, few nations can boast the ability to access such depths. Russia shows a new interest in polar exploration, a discipline it had abandoned for twenty years. The American Russia expert summarizes the episode in one sentence: "Russia is back." In 1998, the reign of President Yeltsin had transformed the former Soviet Empire into a doormat for the West. Today, Moscow holds the third-highest level of foreign exchange reserves in the world after China and Japan. That commands respect.
With a rediscovered confidence after the difficult Yeltsin years, not a day passes that Russia does not go on the offensive to show that it has once again become a key actor. Last week, on the same day that anti-Russian Georgia accused Moscow of having fired a missile close to a village in that Caucasian state, the Russian Navy proceeded to fire a ballistic missile from a nuclear submarine based in the Pacific Ocean. Obviously, the Kremlin did not fear the international press's conflation of the two events. On August 8, Russian bombers effected an aerial passage close to the American Guam base in the Pacific as a provocation. These offensives have one objective: one no longer treats Moscow as any old power, but as a country that commands respect.
"In her day, Margaret Thatcher declared to the annual Munich Security Conference - not without condescension - that she could do business with Gorbatchev. In 2006, it's Putin who asserted that his country could do business with Texan George Bush," Marshall Goldman relates with some irony. Vladimir Putin reacted virulently to the American anti-missile shield project that allows for the installation of bases in the Czech Republic and in Poland. He threatened to deploy cruise missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave and to point them at Europe. And he announced on Sunday that he envisaged endowing his country with an anti-missile shield between now and 2015.
This show of strength produced results. Now the Americans are the first to want to make Russia a partner. In an editorial published August 10 in the International Herald Tribune, former American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger deemed it necessary to take Putin's proposition - voiced during the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, to install anti-missile radars in Azerbaijan rather than Eastern Europe - into account. "America must be more sensitive to Russian complexity, [...] since many global problems can be better solved thanks to Russian-American cooperation." Richard Nixon's former righthand man even thinks that linking American, Russian and NATO anti-missile systems would constitute a "historic" step, allowing for dealing with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and jihadism. In reality, it would also be a means for Washington to prevent the emergence of a Russian-Chinese axis that is evolving at the center of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
How to explain this Russian comeback? There is energy, above all. Moscow is fully profiting from the high prices of the oil and gas the country abounds in. The country's cumulative growth over the last seven years rises to close to 50 percent, or nearly seven percent a year. "Vladimir Putin has acted like a brilliant chess player," Marshall Goldman emphasizes. "He had already written it all out during the middle of the 1990s when he was still in Saint Petersburg, far away from the presidency he now occupies. According to him, in order to restore his country's glory, it was necessary to use the energy weapon, to create national 'champions' like Gazprom. When he became president, he kept his promises. He implemented state capitalism and expelled corrupt executives from public and private companies."
Yet, this strategy could still be undermined by flagrant underinvestment. According to the International Energy Agency, Russia could lack gas for export and to satisfy domestic demand as soon as 2010. A specialist in energy issues at the Russia/NIS unit of the French Institute for International Studies, Adrian Dellecker notes that Central Asia could still serve to mitigate that lack: "Kazakhstan is trying to maintain equidistance between China, the United States and Russia. But, in fact, Russia still controls the pipelines. Kazakh export options remain very limited."
According to the researcher, although Russia does not have the technology for gas liquefaction necessary to exploit the big deposits in Siberia and even the Arctic, it could buy it: "The Russians want to succeed on their own. That's why they want to control the investments." Thus has Moscow dismissed Shell from the Sakhaline-2 gas deposit. But it allowed Total to participate in the exploitation of the Chtokman gas deposits....
Financially, Russia is solid. It prepaid a $15 billion debt to the Paris Club. As for the European Union, it skates along. It showed a common front at the Russian-European Samara summit last May. That surprised Putin, but the front has proven to be fragile. Shortly afterwards, the Russian president took up his pilgrim's staff to negotiate bilateral agreements with Austria, Greece, Belgium and Italy.
"Putin Wants Neither a Return to the Cold War Nor a Confrontation with Washington"
Stéphane Bussard interviews Eric Hoesli
Le Temps
Tuesday 14 August 2007
Le Temps: Last July, an American destroyer berthed at Odessa for military maneuvers in the framework of a NATO exercise. Is that the kind of action that explains the Russian offensives of recent months?
Eric Hoesli: The desire by Russia to resume its position among the world's great nations is understandable. Within NATO, they have always seized the slightest opportunity to obtain the maximum of advantages to Russia's detriment. And they are persuaded that the only language Moscow understands is force. Yet the West has not kept its promises. The extension of NATO went well beyond what had been agreed upon. After the adhesion of the Baltic States, NATO is now courting Ukraine and Georgia.
Vladimir Putin has just suspended the implementation of the Conventional Forces Treaty. An affront to the Europeans?
There also, the West has not kept its promises with respect to disarmament. It's in an untenable position. With its enlargement, NATO has accumulated new forces that create an imbalance with Russia. How can Westerners demand a withdrawal of Russian troops from Moldavia before they'll agree to review the treaty? There is an abyss between what the West says and what it does. It doesn't want to associate Russia with the multi-polar world. It's understandable that the Russians feel besieged.
The Russian president's speech at the Munich Conference in February 2007 marked a turning point in Vladimir Putin's policy.
It's a very constructive, structuring speech that underlines Russia's desire to be respected. Putin wants neither a return to the Cold War nor a confrontation with the United States. He has no imperial or ideological ambitions. He simply aims to invest in a multipolar world by seeking political, economic and strategic alliances with Brazil, China, India, the United States and sometimes Europe.
Russia's rediscovered confidence at the international level has not produced the country's democratization....
Vladimir Putin is not disconnected from Russians' aspirations. Democracy is well-understand as a goal that the country must set for itself. But for the moment the term is so linked to the chaos and injustice of the 1990s that it does not win people's hearts. Putin is the symbolic and political expression of what Russia is living through today: a return to order, a new dignity mixed in with a little revanchist feeling.
What reforms are necessary in Russia?
The big bet is to transform energy power into economic power. It's also to reform the administrative apparatus into a modern and powerful state without falling back into the peculiarities of Soviet bureaucracy.
Is Russian power due solely to energy income, which runs the risk of suffering from the underinvestment in that sector?
Russian political power is going to profit from energy income for a long time. Even after Putin. The Arctic and eastern Siberia represent awesome potential for hydrocarbons.
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Eric Hoesli is a Russian specialist and author of "A la conquête du Caucase," ["Conquering the Caucasus"].
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