Analysis: Putin's difficult choices
By ARIEL COHEN
MOSCOW, Sept. 25 (UPI) -- President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated impressive ability to navigate amid domestic and strategic challenges which would have baffled his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
For example, he is putting Russia alongside the United States in the forthcoming war despite some deeply set anti-American sentiments here.
Moscow insiders told United Press International that Putin had to overrule those in the General Staff and security services who urged a more cautious course toward the conflict for two reasons.
First, they view the United States as a strategic competitor. And, second, they fear retribution from the Muslim and Arab world if they support the U.S. crusade against Islamic extremist terror.
Many in Russia's security establishment have a visceral distrust of the United States, which is largely a vestige of the Soviet era, when America was billed as the "main adversary" of the Soviet armed forces.
Several retired generals who are currently advisors to the Ministry of Defense told UPI at the conference on international security sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a conservative German think tank, that Russia should not bail out the United States "when Washington is pushing NATO enlargement and plans to abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty."
"The planned system, its radar stations, its command-and-control system, and the large number of its planned interceptors, is aimed against Russia," said Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Alexander Klapovsky, Russian Representative to the Standing Advisory Commission on Missile Defense at the Russian Foreign Ministry.
"NATO has committed aggression in Kosovo and will be only less than 200 miles from St. Petersburg (if Estonia joins," claimed retired Col.-Gen. Fyodor Ladygin, the former commander of the Chief Intelligence Directorate, or GRU.
These 60-something veteran senior officers still wield a lot of clout in the corridors of Russian power, where their deputies and proteges occupy leading positions. And they often have lucrative consulting arrangements with arms manufacturers eager to sell to Iran and Iraq.
Many middle class Russians share these sentiments. A popular TV talk show host told UPI that most of e-mail reactions to his show distinguished between suffering of the people, and dislike of America, its foreign policy, and its culture, that in many cases was seen as too arrogant.
Russian military intelligence came up with doomsdays scenarios which, if they come true, would be catastrophic. "Taliban may crush the Northern Alliance, which is leaderless after the Sept. 10 murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance," a former GRU colonel, who now is a senior researcher with one of the academic institutes in Moscow, told UPI.
Another scenario is the United States pushes the Taliban north, but fails to prevent an Islamic rebellion breaking out in Pakistan. Russia would have to send soldiers into the vast deserts of Central Asia, while the pro-Taliban Pushtuns may overthrow President Musharaf of Pakistan and gain up to 75 nuclear weapons with intermediate range ballistic missiles capable of striking at New Delhi and Tashkent," the former officer said.
"The United States may be forced to use tactical nukes to neutralize bin Laden's radical Islamic atomic weapons, while Russia may use weapons of last resort to stop Taliban in Central Asia," he said.
Other groups supporting a go-slow approach in aiding the Untied States include pro-Arab and especially pro-Iraqi circles in Moscow. Duma members like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Alexei Mitrofanov of the extremist anti-Western "Liberal Democratic" Party, who often travel to Baghdad, have issued calls to confront the United States.
Mitrofanov made a laughing stock of himself when he suggested that Russia uses its nuclear shield to protect Muslim countries which may come under U.S. attack.
Finally, there are extremist Russian Muslims, such as Heydar Jemal, chairman of the Islamic Committee of Russia. He told UPI that he advocates "civilizational separation of Russia's Muslims" and introduction of Shari'a (Islamic law). Jemal is quoted as saying that secular laws of Russia are "from the devil."
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov articulated the go-slow approach when last week he ruled out introduction of U.S. troops to the territory of the members of the Mutual Security Treaty of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a regional bloc led by Russia.
However, in less than two weeks, the anti-American faction was overruled by Putin, who placed the reluctant Defense Minister Ivanov in charge of implementing Russia's war efforts.
Putin also "delivered" Central Asian leaders, who are looking up to Russia for their security. According to the Kremlin foreign policy consultants, he did it for three reasons.
First, Putin believes that radical Islamists forces, and especially Taliban and the bin Laden organization, present a clear and present danger to Russia's neighbors in Central Asia and Russia itself.
The Kremlin viewed with apprehension the growing threat to the secular regime of Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov by the Islamic Front of Uzbekistan (IMU) led by Juma Namangani, a wanted terrorist who the Russian news agency RIAN-Novosti said was appointed deputy to bin Laden, thus indicating a possibility of a major attack against Russia's allies.
Second, the Kremlin repeatedly claimed that Chechen separatists are connected to bin Laden. The Taliban regime was the only one which recognize Chechnya's independence. Now the Kremlin sees an opportunity to strike a propaganda and military blow against the Chechens.
Third, Putin saw an unprecedented opportunity to have a breakthrough in relations with the West. He believes that Europe and the United States will change the tone of their statements on Chechnya and will not hound Russia for human rights violations there. His host in Germany, Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder is believed to have promised him exactly that.
As a masterful public relations move, Putin announced a 72-hour window for the Chechen fighters to start negotiations with Putin's special envoy in the South, Gen. (Ret.) Victor Kazantsev, on "putting down the arms and integration in peaceful life" -- not exactly an unconditional surrender that the Russian generals wanted but a kind of move the West would be comfortable with.
And in another move aimed at winning public opinion, Putin initiated an international Islamic conference against terrorism, to be run by Russian moderate Muslim leadership, such as the Chief Mufti of Russia, Gainutdin.
Putin then flew to Germany and delivered an impressive speech -- in German
-- before the Bundestag, the German federal parliament in Berlin. According to the Russian, usually critical, TV6 channel, he is the first foreign leader to do so, and gained a lot of kudos from the audience. Now Putin may ask for something more substantial, like debt forgiveness and rescheduling of the mammoth $100 billion Soviet-era debt.
According to Vyacheslav Nikonov, a leading Moscow political commentator (and the grandson of Stalin's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov), Russia should use the unprecedented flux in international relations to speed up integration with the West and put the Cold War confrontational rhetoric firmly in the past.
Nikonov and younger analysts dismiss the old generals as unreconstructed cold warriors. He says that Russia should ask for more quid-pro-quo for its impressive cooperation against Afghanistan and bin Laden: cancellation or postponement of NATO enlargement to the Baltics and concessions on the ABM Treaty.
During the latest crisis Putin managed to translate his high popular approval ratings to some impressive leadership.
He may have global economic factors working against him. But if the oil prices, the main source of his country's revenue, hold above $20 a barrel, if Russia does not enter a recession, and does not need to shed blood in Afghanistan, Putin may yet emerge as strategist who seized the moment to bring his country closer to the West.
Ariel Cohen, Ph.D. is Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author of Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis (Greenwood/Praeger, 1998).
