Grrrr… - modern Russia

National Review, Feb 6, 1995 by Adrian Karatnycky

RUSSIAN planes and artillery continue to bomb the civilians of breakaway Chechnya, a worrying sign of a cardinal change in the Kremlin's domestic policy. But Russia's foreign policy under President Boris Yeltsin and Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev has also made a fundamental shift that is putting it at odds with U.S. interests. At times, in the last year, Russia has behaved constructively, as when it withdrew its troops from the Baltic states, and when it supported the U.S. position on Haiti; at other times--and with increasing frequency--it has begun adopting policies that resemble those of its Soviet predecessor.

Although Foreign Minister Kozyrev recently claimed on Meet the Press that Russia "shall seek full strategic and pragmatic partnership with the U.S.," the unmistakable drift of Russia's policies has been in the direction of an often reckless assertion of power. This shift has come in three stages. In 1992, the first year after the collapse of the USSR, Russia began efforts to reassert hegemony over former Soviet republics. Under the pretext of protecting the rights of ethnic Russians and "Russian speakers" in what was dubbed the "near abroad," Russia began to intervene in the internal affairs of newly independent states. Russian security forces assisted two coup attempts in Azerbaijan, and Russian troops have been involved in conflicts in Moldova, Tajikistan, and Georgia. In 1994, Russian officials began to assert the right to intervene in neighboring states if ethnic Russians were persecuted. On December 12, the head of President Yeltsin's Department of Citizenship Affairs charged that "most of the new states" discriminate against Russian populations. Also in December, President Yeltsin upped the ante by issuing a decree that unilaterally extends the right of Russian citizenship to citizens of the non-Russian republics of the former USSR, against the objections of most of their leaders.

A central thrust of Russia's foreign policy in the "near abroad" has been the effort to transform the Commonwealth of Independent States into an economic, military, and political union. Last June, Lieutenant General Leonid Ivashov, who serves as secretary of the Council of Defense Ministers of the CIS, said he favored "a military or defense union" that would lead to the creation of joint or single armed forces of the CIS countries." With increasing frequency, President Yeltsin has spoken on behalf of the 12 states that are formally part of the CIS, most recently in Budapest last month at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The vast majority of Russia's political elite favors the creation of a cohesive union of states that would resemble the old USSR.

The second phase of the turn to a hard line began in the summer of 1993, when Russia extended its assertive policies to Eastern and Central Europe, successfully opposing the rapid integration of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia into NATO. The policy initially was articulated in terms of concern about the domestic consequences of such an expansion, which Foreign Minister Kozyrev suggested would strengthen the hand of anti-Western Communists and neofascist hard-liners. But at a meeting of foreign ministers from NATO and the former Warsaw Pact last June in Istanbul, Russia was at its most uncooperative, blocking any reference in the meeting's final statement to expansion of NATO membership eastward. One angry NATO diplomat, quoted by Reuters, said the gathering had been a "pretty bloody affair. It was an absolutely Soviet exercise, a disastrous performance by the Russians, and it does not augur well." Russia's opposition to NATO expansion has grown more shrill in recent months, capped off by President Yeltsin's warning in Budapest on December 5 that a NATO move eastward would plunge the world into a "Cold Peace."

At the United Nations, Russia has shown its new face with its aggressive pursuit of a pro-Serbian policy that led to Russia's first Security Council veto since the collapse of the USSR. In Poland, Russia used an incident in which Russians and other citizens of the former USSR were manhandled by Polish police as the pretext for canceling an October visit by Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and holding up the signing of a number of commercial agreements, sending Polish-Russian relations into a deep chill. As Russia reasserted itself in the former USSR and in Central and Eastern Europe, the State Department accepted the legitimacy of Russia's interests in the "near abroad" and showed understanding for Russian concerns about international isolation. Some in the Central Intelligence Agency and at the State Department even warmed to the idea of Russia as a force for stability in the former USSR, particularly in Central Asia and the Caucasus. This policy of cooperation, aid, and accommodation, however, did little to moderate Russian conduct. Instead, it may have encouraged Russia to move to the third phase of its reassertion of power: during the last six months, Russia has been making overtures to countries that are in the front ranks of America's enemies, including Iraq and Cuba.