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Monday, Feb 28, 2005

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Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Putin stands firm

By Vladimir Radyuhin

Mr. Putin has positioned Russia as too valuable a U.S. partner in security, non-proliferation, and energy for Mr. Bush to turn his back on him.

THE MAIN result of the meeting in Bratislava on February 24 between the Russian and U.S. Presidents, Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush, is that the two leaders pledged to maintain during their second presidential term the positive agenda they set for bilateral relations over the past four years: cooperation on terrorism, security, non-proliferation, and energy.

The constructive tone of the Russian-American summit, the first since Mr. Bush's re-election last November, was a victory for the Russian leader considering the enormous pressure that has recently built up in the United States to punish Russia for its "neo-imperialist" foreign policy and for "rolling back of democracy" inside the country.

When the Republican administration took over from the Democrats in 2001 its first move was to downgrade relations with Russia and disband the joint economic commission headed by the U.S. Vice-President and the Russian Prime Minister. It took Mr. Putin nearly a year to unfreeze bilateral ties.

As Mr. Bush embarked on his second term, storm clouds gathered again on the Russian-American horizon. Mr. Putin's moves to consolidate power at home and his increasingly assertive foreign policy driven by Russia's economic revival have provoked the most virulent anti-Russian campaign in the West since the end of the Cold War. Western media compared Mr. Putin to Mussolini and Hitler, and accused him of rebuilding a totalitarian empire in the former Soviet Union.

The U.S. President has been under tremendous pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to get tough with the Russian leader and a number of U.S. senators demanded that Russia be excluded from the Group of Eight.

Yet, the meeting did not produce any backslide in Russian-American ties. Mr. Bush emerged from the two-and-a-half hour meeting with Mr. Putin saying they had a "very important and constructive" dialogue and "produced a lot of positive results."

Russia secured a crucial U.S. pledge to help it join the World Trade Organisation this year itself. The two leaders agreed to work together on international measures to protect nuclear material and to share information on how best to improve security at nuclear facilities to "counter the evolving terrorist threats." A separate agreement was signed on the sidelines to enhance control over shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles.

Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin said they reached agreement on most other issues discussed, including a pledge to work to prevent Iran and North Korea from acquiring nuclear arms.

"The common ground is a lot more than those areas where we disagree," Mr. Bush said summing up the talks.

A great deal of this common ground is to be found in a joint statement on energy cooperation, which is a key to understanding the success of the summit. Russian oil was easily the biggest single factor that swayed Mr. Bush in favour of continuing a cooperative relationship with Moscow.

The U.S. has long been eyeing Russian energy resources. Back in 2002 Yukos, then Russia's biggest private oil company, planned to sell a controlling 44 per cent share to either ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco and use the proceeds to finance the construction of a $4-billion pipeline from Russia's western Siberian oil fields to Murmansk, a northern port capable of sending super tankers directly to America. The U.S. was looking to sourcing more than 13 per cent of its oil supplies from Russia in order to ease its dependence on the increasingly volatile Middle East.

Mr. Putin, who pushed to reassert state control over the energy sector, wrecked the plan. The Yukos head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested last year on charges of fraud and tax evasion, and his main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, was confiscated by the state in December in partial settlement of a multi-billion back-tax bill slapped on Yukos.

Meanwhile, Russia, which currently exports the bulk of its oil and gas to Europe, has turned to the East to diversify its energy export routes. In December, Moscow announced plans to build a 50-million-tonne oil pipeline from Eastern Siberia to the Pacific port of Nakhodka from where crude will be shipped to Japan and Korea. Simultaneously, Russia pledged strategic energy partnership with China and India. Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar visited Moscow just two days before the Putin-Bush summit to win Russia's support for multi-billion-dollar Indian investment in the Russian energy sector.

This scramble for Russian oil threatened to leave the U.S. out in the cold. In Bratislava Mr. Bush readily traded off a pledge he made two days earlier in Brussels to put "democratic reform at the heart of our dialogue with Russia" for a piece of the Russian oil pie.

The joint statement issued by the Russian and U.S. Presidents described energy cooperation as "one of the most promising areas of Russian-American relations." The document called for "increased Russian oil and gas imports to U.S. markets," the construction of the Murmansk pipeline, and the launch of several joint energy projects, including an oil pipeline and LNG production, by 2008. By recalling at the post-summit press conference the sale of a Russian Government stake in the LukOil giant to U.S. CoconoPhilips, a deal he personally approved last year, Mr. Putin made it clear that any American penetration of the Russian energy sector will be under Kremlin control.

Mr. Bush has accepted the new rules of the game. Within hours of the Bratislava summit a U.S. court in Houston, Texas, passed the long-awaited ruling on a Yukos plea against the expropriation of its Yuganskneftegaz unit. The court refused to hear the case in the U.S. thereby sealing the Russian Government's victory in the battle for control of Russia's biggest private oil company.

While the timing of the court ruling may be accidental it underlined the fact that over the past four-five years Russia has become too important a global player for Washington to ignore or alienate Moscow, especially at a time when the U.S. is deeply mired in Iraq. Mr. Putin has positioned Russia as too valuable a U.S. partner in security, non-proliferation and energy for Mr. Bush to turn his back on him.

With Russia's economy rebounding on the oil revenue windfall, Mr. Putin is far less susceptible to U.S. pressure than his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was. Mr. Putin firmly rebuffed Mr. Bush's expression of "concerns about Russia's commitment in fulfilling these universal principles [of democracy]," even if in the U.S. President's own words he "did so in a constructive and friendly way."

Addressing a joint press conference with Mr. Bush, Mr. Putin stated that "the principles of democracy should be adequate to the current status of the development of Russia, to our history and our traditions," and that the advent of democracy should not come in such a way that it is "accompanied by the collapse of the state and the impoverishment of the people" — a clear reference to the chaotic rule of Mr. Yeltsin, whose democratic credentials the West never questioned.

"I'm absolutely confident that democracy is not anarchy. It is not a possibility to do anything you want. It is not the possibility for anyone to rob your own people," Mr. Putin said.

In the run-up to the Bratislava summit, Mr. Putin paraded his independent foreign policy by offering to sell arms to Syria, branded by Washington a "sponsor of terrorism," and supporting Iran in its nuclear row with the U.S.

Russia also announced plans to hold a massive joint military exercise with China on Chinese territory in 2005 involving troops, submarines and strategic bombers. The first ever joint war games sparked fears in Washington that Russia and China could be on the way to forming a military alliance. While such an alliance seems a remote possibility at present, Mr. Putin sent a signal to the U.S. that he is prepared to play the China card if Washington continued its zero-sum game for influence in the former Soviet Union.

It was one area of Russian-American relations that was not mentioned — at least publicly — at the Bratislava summit in a sign that the sides probably failed to come to any agreement on this divisive issue.

True to his newly declared crusade to plant American-type freedom globally, Mr. Bush predicted in a speech in Bratislava ahead of his meeting with Mr. Putin that "democratic revolutions" the U.S. helped engineer in Georgia and Ukraine will march across the rest of Russia's ex-Soviet backyard. He specifically mentioned Belarus, Russia's closest military and economic ally. Time will show if this was a gesture to accommodate neo-liberal fundamentalists in the U.S. or the guiding principle of Mr. Bush's second term.

U.S. meddling in the former Soviet states poses the biggest threat to cooperative relations between Moscow and Washington. The future of these relations will ultimately depend on whether Moscow can convince Washington that a strong Russia serves U.S. interests best and is the most reliable guarantee of stability in the Eurasian region.

The Bratislava summit gave some ground for guarded optimism on this score. It showed that the Bush administration put energy and security issues above its concerns for democracy in this part of the world.

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