Vladimir Putin and the Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy

Vladimir Putin and the Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 1-165

  Lo, Bobo ^a,b  

^a ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS   (United Kingdom)

^b Carnegie Moscow Center   (Russian Federation)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84889300319     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9780470696408     Document Type: Book

References (234)

1. Lilia Shevtsova, 'Mezhdu stabilizatsiei i proryvom: promezhutochnye itogi pravleniya Vladimira Putina', Brifing Moskovskogo Tsentra Karnegi, January 2002, p. 2.
2. In contrast to the Soviet principle of 'collective leadership' -see note 3 above.
3. Although there has been some media criticism of Putin, this has for the most part been sporadic, peripheral and/or muted. In a country whose government professes a strong allegiance to democratic and civil ideals, the overwhelmingly laudatory coverage of the President is striking indeed.
4. Bobo Lo, Russian Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era: Reality, Illusion and Mythmaking (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2002), pp. 5-6, 151-4.
5. It has been estimated that Putin visited more countries in the first year of his presidency than Yeltsin did during his two presidential terms.
6. Bobo Lo, Russian Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era., pp. 154-5.
7. Lenin used the phrase kto kogo to encapsulate the zero-sum, life-and-death, nature of the political struggle.
8. Dmitri Trenin, '"Osennii marafon" Vladimira Putina: k rozhdeniyu Rossiiskoi vneshnepoliticheskoi strategii', Brifing Moskovskogo Tsentra Karnegi, 20 November 2001, p. 6.
9. See 'Verkhnyaya Volta s yadernymi raketami, velikimi sportsmenami i bezmozglymi funktsionerami', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 26 February 2002, p. 1.
10. Viktor Chernomyrdin succeeded Yegor Gaidar in December 1992, surviving (at times miraculously) until March 1998. His successors showed nothing like the same powers of political longevity: Kiriyenko managed four months before being unseated by the August 1998 financial crash; Primakov, appointed in September 1998, was dismissed in May 1999; and Stepashin lasted a derisory three months (May-August 1999).
11. Perhaps the most public of these scandals was the one involving the Swiss construction company, Mabetex, and members of Yeltsin's close family (including Yeltsin himself and his two daughters). The Washington Post alleged in September 1999 that Mabetex had paid millions of dollars into the private accounts of the Yeltsin family in return for winning contracts to refurbish the Kremlin.
12. Although the financial crash led to a four-fold devaluation of the rouble, it also resulted in Russian consumer goods becoming much more competitive, both internally and internationally. Virtually overnight, many Western imports became unaffordable, leaving the field open to domestically produced commodities. The crash significantly improved Moscow's already positive total trade balance, and led to a marked increase in trade turnover with the CIS (particularly Belarus).
13. The Army's bombardment of the White House -the seat of the Supreme Soviet -in October 1993 marked the culmination of a prolonged and increasingly bitter struggle for power between the executive and the legislature. For an excellent account of these developments and the issues involved
14. see Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin's Russia: Myths and Reality (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, 1999), pp. 37-90.
15. The most notorious of these was the 1995 'loans-for-shares' arrangement whereby blocks of shares in state-owned blue-chip companies were given to banks in return for generous loans to the government.
16. See Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova and Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: Privatizing the Russian Economy (ILR Press/Cornell, Ithaca and London, 1997), pp. 74-6.
17. It was Primakov who, in the 1990s, did most to popularize the term 'multivectored'. He appears to have first used it in public in 1993 in connection with the creation of an 'integral system of collective security' in Europe ('Opravdano li rasshirenie NATO?', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 26 November 1993, p. 3). Subsequently, in his first press conference as Foreign Minister, he applied the term to describe the administration's intended approach to the conduct of Russian foreign policy more generally (see 'Primakov nachinaet s SNG', Moskovskie novosti, no. 2, 14-21 January 1996, p. 13).
18. See, for example, Georgi Arbatov, 'A New Cold War', Foreign Policy, no. 95, Summer 1994, p. 101.
19. Andrei Kozyrev thus noted: 'Russia, one way or another, remains a great power. For the communists and nationalists, an aggressive and threatening power, for the democrats, a peaceful and prosperous one. But in all cases a great power. And therefore it cannot be a junior partner [with the West], only an equal partner' -Preobrazhenie ("Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya", Moscow, 1995), p. 221.
20. In this context, Kozyrev spoke about the importance of the 'consultation reflex', whereby the West would consult or at least inform Russia prior to undertaking any significant international engagement -'Rossiya i SShA: Partnerstvo ne prezhdevremenno, a zapazdyvaet', Izvestiya, 11 March 1994, p. 3.
21. The proposed 'counter-measures' included non-ratification of the START-2 agreement and the development of the CIS as a counter-bloc to NATO (see Defence Minister Rodionov's comments in Igor Korotchenko, 'Igor Rodionov vystupil za sozdanie oboronnogo soyuza stran SNG', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 26 December 1996, p. 1). On a more general note, Primakov foreshadowed early on a 'fundamental rethinking' of Russian security thinking ('Opravdano li rasshirenie NATO?', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 26 November 1993, p. 3).
22. See, for example, Primakov's comments in an interview published by Rossiiskaya gazeta on 10 January 1997 ('God Evgeniya Primakova'), p. 2.
23. During his short stint in power (14 months, of which the last six were inactive), Andropov initiated some important reforms in enterprise management and to improve labour incentives
24. see Bobo Lo, Soviet Labour Ideology and the Collapse of the State (Macmillan Press and St Martin's Press, Basingstoke and New York, 2000), pp. 37-45. As for his patronage of Gorbachev, the latter acknowledged that '[a]mong the leaders of the country, there was no one else with whom I had such close and old ties, and to whom I owed so much' -Memoirs (Doubleday, London, 1996), p. 152.
25. See Ot pervogo litsa: razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym (Vagrius, Moscow, 2000), pp. 72-5.
26. A senior Western diplomat in Moscow described to me Russia's selective approach to engagement with the West as 'integration à la carte'.
27. Ot pervogo litsa, p. 156.
28. A notable exception is the heavy pressure Russia has been exerting on Georgia in relation to the presence of Chechen guerrillas in the Pankisi gorge. Interestingly, domestic liberal criticism of government policy here has been muted, as has that of an international community preoccupied by the early prospect of American military intervention against Saddam Hussein.
29. Television statement by President Putin on 13 December 2001 (http://www.putin. ru/status.asp).
30. In a famous article in Foreign Affairs, Kozyrev called for a 'constructive partnership' between Russia and the United States that would 'influence positively the course of world affairs' ('The Lagging Partnership', Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 3, May/June 1994, p. 59).
31. See also Clinton-Yeltsin declaration at the Vancouver summit in April 1993 -Izvestiya, 6 April 1993, p. 1.
32. CTR, established by US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar in 1992, is an ongoing programme for the safe dismantlement and disposal of obsolete Soviet/Russian nuclear missiles and their materials.
33. Kozyrev, Preobrazhenie, p. 221 (see note 8 above).
34. For example, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in February 1997, Anatolii Chubais claimed that a NATO enlargement over Russian objections would be the West's biggest political mistake in 50 years. Later, Grigorii Yavlinsky criticized the alliance's military intervention over Kosovo in very strong terms (Segodnya, 25 March 1999, p. 2).
35. This was a fairly common complaint of Western European diplomats in Moscow, especially during Yeltsin's second term.
36. It has been claimed that in eight years as president Boris Yeltsin failed to meet with any of the Russian diaspora communities in the former Soviet Union (Natalya Airapetova, 'Stranam SNG sleduet ozhidat syurprizov ot Rossii, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 25 January 2000, p. 5). On a more substantive level, Anatol Lieven has remarked on Moscow's unwillingness to invest even in such relatively low-cost ventures as Russian-language TV broadcasts to diaspora areas in the CIS ('The Weakness of Russian Nationalism', Survival, vol. 41, no.2, Summer 1999, p. 59).
37. In various conversations during the 1990s, Chinese diplomats and journalists suggested to me that Moscow viewed good relations with Beijing principally as a means of managing the geostrategic balance with the United States.
38. The Asians outside the 'big two' (China and Japan) felt this neglect especially keenly.
39. During a visit to Moscow in September 1997, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak made a very public point of saying that Russia had become largely irrelevant in the MEPP ('Hosni Mubarak: "Rossiya dolzhna vernutsya na blizhnii vostok"', interview in Nezavisimaya gazeta, 23 September 1997, p. 1).
40. This was particularly the case over Iraq. Intense Russian mediation efforts in the second half of the 1990s were ineffective in persuading Saddam Hussein to cooper-ate with UNSCOM inspections or in preventing American and British air-strikes against Iraqi targets (culminating in Operation Desert Fox in December 1998).
41. Vladimir Lukin, then Russian Ambassador to Washington (and later Head of the Duma's International Affairs Committee) wrote that while there would always be 'tensions and disputes' within the democratic community, they were the 'problems of a common civilization with a shared system of values based on the ideas that human life is precious and that the individual comes before the state' -'Our Security Predicament', Foreign Policy, no. 88, Fall 1992, p. 75.
42. The 'climax' (or nadir) came during Yeltsin's last overseas visit, to Beijing in December 1999. On this occasion, he reacted to American criticisms of the war in Chechnya by angrily declaring that Russia and China, not America, 'would dictate to the world'
43. see Dmitrii Gornostaev, 'Eltsin napomnil Klintonu i miru: Rossiya ostaetsya yadernoi derzhavoi', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 10 December 1999, p. 1.
44. See comments by NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson during a visit to Moscow in November 2001, in 'NATO brings radical offer to Putin', http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1671654.stm.
45. Putin and Bush met for the first time at the Russia-USA summit in Brdo, Slovenia, in June 2001 -a good six months after Bush's victory in the American presidential elections.
46. See Putin's televised remarks at a meeting with government ministers on 8 October 2001 (http://www.putin.ru/status.asp).
47. In his latest volume of memoirs written after his retirement, Yeltsin refers to his fears in the second half of 1999 that Primakov's political success would 'lead the country back to the socialism of yesteryear' -Midnight Diaries (Phoenix, London, 2001), p. 268.
48. As Stalin put it, 'the cadres decide everything' -address to graduates of the Red Army Academies, 4 May 1935 (see http://www.marx2mao.org/Stalin/GRA35.html).
49. A very senior Foreign Ministry official encapsulated the problem in the following contradictory terms: on the one hand, the MFA now had greater control and influence over foreign policy, while the overall policy-making environment was also more disciplined and functional. On the other hand, the number of foreign policy actors had grown, and with it the problems of foreign policy free-lancing by often unqualified parties. His summation was that the environment was now a better one for the MFA (and Russia) than under Yeltsin, but remained difficult.
50. The most categorical of a raft of dismissive comments about the Foreign Ministry is to be found in The Economist which claims that the MFA 'provides little more than a delivery service for other people's messages' -'The president's ear', 16-22 February 2002, p. 46. This view is fairly representative of much of Russian elite opinion.
51. The term 'braking mechanism' (mekhanizm tormozheniya) was originally used by Gorbachev to describe the 'alien' (to socialism) phenomena that had arrested the Soviet Union's socio-economic development in the second half of the 1970s -Perestroika i novoe myshlenie dlya nashei strany i dlya vsego mira (Politizdat, Moscow 1987), p. 13.
52. A senior NATO country diplomat in Moscow told me that the MFA -at Deputy Minister level -had led the Russian side in the substantive negotiations prior to the NATO-Russia Rome summit.
53. The most conspicuous example of the heightened profile and influence of the security services in the MFA was the appointment in June 2000 of the then head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, as First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
54. Perhaps the most dramatic illlustration of such freelancing was the seizure by Russian peacekeepers of Slatina (Pristina) airport in June 1999. As Foreign Minister Ivanov's comments at the time revealed ('the mistake will be corrected'), the MOD failed to inform, let alone consult, the Russian Foreign Ministry over this highly controversial action -see Natalya Kalashnikova and Andrei Smirnov, 'Kuzkina mat dlya vnutrennego potrebleniya', Segodnya, 14 June 1999, p. 1.
55. As formalized in the joint ministerial Consultative group on strategic security, established at the May 2002 Russian-American summit in Moscow.
56. http://www.3.itu.int/MISSIONS/Russia/Bull/2001/25-2106B.htm.
57. According to one story doing the rounds in March 2002, the Security Council had not met for five months. Although one should be cautious about accepting such accounts at face value, they nevertheless serve to highlight the Council's declining policy fortunes following Sergei Ivanov's transfer to the MOD.
58. A related problem here is how to evaluate the introduction of senior security figures into the MFA, such as the appointment of former SVR head Trubnikov as First Deputy Foreign Minister (see note 6 above). Does one interpret this and similar cases as highlighting the influence of the security services, a sort of 'securitization' of the Foreign Ministry, or do they reflect instead the latter's growing stature at the expense of the former?
59. It is rumoured that a delegation of prominent Moscow political figures called on Putin in early 2002 to express their concerns on this score.
60. A well-placed liberal commentator told me that Gaidar and Nemtsov had worked very long hours in preparing Putin's 2002 address to the Federal Assembly. Although it is impossible to confirm this directly, it cannot be coincidental that (i) the speech focused principally on socio-economic reforms and requirements; and (ii) the dominant foreign policy themes were WTO accession and the challenges economic globalization posed for Russia.
61. During the post-Soviet period, the Central Bank, particularly under the leadership of Viktor Gerashchenko, acquired a reputation for conservatism and unreconstructed attitudes towards economic reform and foreign investment. Few in the foreign economic community were sorry to see his eventual dismissal in March 2002.
62. On the Presidential Administration's moderating effect on policy, see (i) re NATO enlargement, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 10 January 1997, p. 2;
63. Re Kosovo, Vitalii Marsov and Nikolai Ulyanov, 'Chernomyrdin zaimetsya yugoslavskim krizisom', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 15 April 1999, p. 3.
64. A senior MFA official told me at the time of the Krasnoyarsk summit that the Ministry had been very concerned at Primakov's exclusion, as well as by the fact that 'unrealistic' expectations had been raised about possible territorial concessions to Tokyo.
65. The head of the Presidential Administration's foreign policy office, Sergei Prikhodko,emphasized in an interview shortly after his appointment that the size of the office was far too small even to contemplate supplanting the Foreign Ministry in any way -'Administratsiya prezidenta -ne apparat TsK KPSS', Segodnya, 17 October 1997, p. 3.
66. See Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (Phoenix, London, 2001), p. 217.
67. Under this informal agreement, the Russian government undertook not to negotiate any new arms deals with Tehran and to wind up existing commitments over the next few years.
68. Putin's public popularity has remained consistently at around 70 per cent. Even after the Kursk submarine disaster (August 2000) and the President's unwise decision not to curtail his holiday in the Crimea, his rating did not dip below 65 per cent
69. see Galina Kovalskaya, 'Osnovnoi instinct', Itogi, 29 August 2000, p. 23). Meanwhile, Putin has enjoyed an effective (if not a technical) majority in the Duma since the December 1999 elections -see note 21, chapter 2.
70. Alex Pravda Described the influence of the Duma under Yeltsin as essentially indirect, 'less as a body exercising formal accountability than as a forum articulating and amplifying opinions which affected the political climate in which executive decisions were made' -'The Public Politics of Foreign Policy', in Neil Malcolm, Alex Pravda, Roy Allison and Margot Light, Internal Factors in Russian Foreign Policy (The Royal Institute of International Affairs and Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996), p. 218.
71. See comments by Andrei Ryabov in an interview with Vremya MN of 19 October 2001 (www.rferl.com/rpw/2001/10/27-301001.html).
72. See note 22, chapter 2.
73. See NAPSNet Daily Report of 3 October 2001 (http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/dr/0110/OCT03.html#item17).
74. For interesting survey data on this question, see Julie Corwin, 'Is Putin Popular Because He's Not Yeltsin?' Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Russian Political Weekly, vol. 2, no. 9, 18 March 2002, http://www.rferl.org/rpw/2002/03/9-180302.html.
75. The principle of a 'presidential' foreign policy is enshrined in the 1993 Constitution. Article 86 notes that the President shall 'govern the foreign policy of the Russian Federation', as well as hold negotiations, sign international treaties and ratification instruments, and receive diplomatic credentials (http://www. constitution. ru/en/10003000-05.htm).
76. According to The Economist, Putin 'seems to have thought up his new pro-western policy mainly off his own bat'. It adds, more generally, that Putin 'looks quite lonely on [the foreign policy] front. He may have his best chats on foreign affairs with other world leaders '-see 'The president's ear', 16-22 February 2002, p. 46.
77. Speaking of grey eminences, certain parallels can be drawn between Chubais's role under Yeltsin, and those of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin under Louis XIII and Louis XIV of France.
78. As Anders Åslund has noted, '[p]rivatization was supposed to change not only the economy but the whole society' -see Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 295.
79. See Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, p. 16.
80. Subsequent to his involvement in the loans-for-shares arrangement (see note 5, chapter 2), in November 1997 Chubais became embroiled in a very public scandal after he accepted a US$90,000 advance payment for a proposed book on privatization.
81. It is interesting that Chubais consistently ranks fourth in Nezavisimaya gazeta's monthly poll, Russia's '100 leading politicians', behind Putin, Prime Minister Kasyanov, and Head of the Presidential Administration Alexander Voloshin, but ahead of such notables as Sergei Ivanov (fifth), Alexei Kudrin (sixth) and German Gref (tenth).
82. In Ot pervogo litsa, Putin refers to Kudrin by the affectionate diminutive, Lyosha (p. 120).
83. Certainly the snail-like pace of military reform and footdragging over alternative civilian service would appear to support this interpretation.
84. For example, Russia has never had a bureaucratic hierarchy in the Weberian sense; there are institutions, but no superstructure that functions as a mechanism for the distribution of power. (I am indebted to Ole Lindeman for this insight.)
85. The term 'transmission belt' was originally used in Soviet times to describe the dual but complementary role of trade unions: representing the workers' interests to the government, while ensuring the efficient implementation of state economic plans by the workforce 47 See note 3, chapter 1.
86. See Putin's criticisms of the bureaucracy in his 2002 address to the Federal Assembly, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 19 April 2002, p. 4.
87. It is worth emphasizing here that Russia's membership of the Paris Club owed much more to the size of its Soviet-era debt to Western creditors, than to its 'integration' in global economic processes or its creditor status vis-à-vis former Soviet republics and client states.
88. For example, Deputy Foreign Minister Karasin remarked following APEC's decision to admit Russia that he saw 'nothing objectionable' in the USA, Russia,China and Japan pursuing 'flexible forms of cooperation aimed at resolving not only economic but also political questions, for example, in the field of strategic security' -'"Zolotogo dozhdya" ne ozhidaetsya', Moskovkie novosti, no.48, 30 November-7 December 1997, p. 5.
89. See note 30, chapter 2.
90. See Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 401.
91. Kozyrev, for example, argued that the world needed Russia 'as a strong member of the family of free, law-based, democratic states and not as a "sick man" of Europe and Asia' -'The Lagging Partnership', Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 3, May/June 1994, p. 62.
92. See Putin's Open Letter to the Russian Voters, http://www.putin2000.ru/07/html.
93. See Putin's annual address to the Federal Assembly, 3 April 2001 -'Ne budet ni revolyutsii, ni kontrrevolyutsii', Rossiiskaya gazeta, 4 April 2001, p. 4.
94. See The Economist (print version), 29 November 2001, www.economist.com.
95. These efforts were ultimately successful. The EU formally conferred on Russia the status of a 'full market economy' at the Russia-EU summit in Moscow on 30 May 2002, with the United States following suit a week later.
96. It is worth mentioning in this connection that the Putin administration has laid considerable stress on establishing conditions that would attract the return of Russian capital from 'safe havens' abroad (such as Cyprus).
97. See comments by Igor Ivanov -'Igor Ivanov: Zapadnye subekty Rossii dolzhny ne poteryat, a vyigrat ot rasshirenie ES', 6 March 2002-www.strana.ru.
98. See Putin's 2001 address to the Federal Assembly, http://www3.itu.int/MISSIONS/Russia/speechs.html.
99. Economic integration and the specific question of Russia's WTO accession emerged as much the most important foreign policy themes in Putin's annual address to the Federal Assembly on 18 April 2002 (see http://www.great-britain.mid.ru/GreatBritain/prezident.htm).
100. 'WTO Accession: What's in it for Russia', speech at the Roundtable: 'Russia, the International Economy and the WTO', Moscow, 30 March 2001, http://europa. eu.int/comm/trade/speeches_articles/spla54_en.htm.
101. The Economist (print version), 22 November 2001, www.economist.com.
102. One need only recall the example of COMECON (or Council for Mutual Economic Assistance -CMEA), a body created to reinforce the Soviet Union's grip on its client states. The existence of a strictly nominal community hardly masked the reality that all policy flowed out of Moscow.
103. See 'The Road to the WTO', Economist Intelligence Unit, 31 July 2001, file://C:\Program Files\RBB31\Work\HTML\RB3233.HTM.
104. Such institutionalized opposition was one of the principal reasons behind the failure of economic reforms under Kosygin in the 1960s and Gorbachev in the 1980s.
105. The notion of a common European economic space involving Russia was formalized at the EU-Russia summit in May 2001. Its basic rationale is to establish a closer economic relationship between the two parties, involving greater economic integration and synchronization of laws and regulations -see http://europa.eu.int/comm/trade/bilateral/russia/rus_memo.htm.
106. See, for example, Marina Volkova, 'Energeticheskii krizis sblizil Moskvu s Evrosoyuzom', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 31 October 2000, p. 1.
107. As an Australian diplomat in Moscow in the latter half of the 1990s, I often encountered this argument in discussions with the MFA's Second Asia Department (responsible for Japan, Oceania, and Asia-Pacific regional issues, including APEC accession).
108. See 'Russia: Oil and Gas Exports', USA Energy Information Administration fact-sheet, October 2001, www.eia.doe.gov.
109. A senior Western oil executive described the situation to me as 'improving, but still very difficult'.
110. Lukoil's stake in the Caspian Oil Consortium managing the 'Contract of the Century' was a modest 10 per cent, and this only after belated negotiations -see Georgii Bovt, 'V politike nichya chasto oznachaet pobedu', Kommersant-Daily, 10 October 1995, pp. 1, 4.
111. Moscow's basic concern was that construction of a major pipeline bypassing Russia altogether would exclude it from the region, not only economically but also strategically -see Konstantin Varlamov, 'Sammit OBSE -porazhenie Moskvy?', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 23 November 1999, p. 5.
112. In early 2002 the president of the Azerbaijan state oil company (SOCAR), Natik Aliev, claimed that Lukoil intended to buy a share of 7.5-8 per cent -see Michael Lelyveld, 'Caucasus: Will Russia's LUKoil Join The Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline Project?', 27 February 2002, http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2002/02/27022002092411.asp.
113. See 'Russia: Oil and Gas Exports', www.eia.doe.gov.
114. For example, Ukraine's gas debt is estimated to be around US$1.4 billion (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/ukraine.html)
115. while Georgia is said to owe Russia USD 90 million (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/armenia.html).
116. See Russia Country Analysis Brief, USA Energy Information Administration, October 2001, www.eia.doe.gov.
117. Under the Blue Stream project signed in 1997, Moscow and Ankara agreed tobuild a pipeline to transport Russian natural gas to Turkey via the Black Sea. It is anticipated that once the pipeline reaches full capacity Gazprom will be able to deliver 16 billion cubic metres of gas per annum (http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/company/cnc22698.htm).
118. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the Soviet Union/Russia's share of the global arms market plummeted from 35.6 per cent of total (second only to the United States) in 1988 down to 8.6 per cent in 1996, behind the USA (42.6), the UK (22.1) and France (14.1) - see The Military Balance 1997/98 (IISS/Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997), p. 265.
119. According to a very well-placed Asian source, the Russian S-300 system was superior in range and reliability to the American Patriot missile, as well as being considerably cheaper. However, political realities, including pressure from then Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, ensured that Seoul bought American.
120. In November 2000 the Russian government publicly repudiated the 1995 Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement on Russian arms sales to Iran (see note 21, chapter 3).
121. See Henry Meyer, 'Russian Arms Sales Hit Record 4.4 Billion Dollars in 2001', AFP report, 26 December 2001, www.spacedaily.com.
122. Putin's Open Letter to the Russian Voters, http://www.putin2000.ru/07/05.html.
123. See Edward L. Morse and James Richard, 'The Battle for Energy Dominance', Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 2, March/April 2002, p. 17;
124. Isabel Gorst, 'Burying the Hatchet', Petroleum Economist, vol. 69, no. 7, July 2002, p. 6.
125. As formalized in the Russo-Chinese 'Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Formation of a New International Order' - Rossiiskie vesti, 25 April 1997, pp. 1-2.
126. For example, with Malaysia - see Lyuba Pronina, 'Weapons Sales: The Peace Dividend's Evil Twin', St Petersburg Times, 26 November 2002, http://gvnewsnet.com/html/worldreacts/alert55.html.
127. It was the historian Richard Pipes who used the term, 'patrimonial mentality', to describe Moscow's assertive behaviour with the newly independent former Soviet republics - 'Is Russia Still an Enemy?', Foreign Affairs, vol. 76, no. 5, September/October 1997, p. 73.
128. Another example of Russia using economic methods for political leverage is the ongoing threat to build a new gas pipeline from Russia to Poland via Belarus (thereby sidestepping Ukraine).
129. Perhaps the most signal demonstration of the growing closeness of American relations with several of the CIS states was the attendance by the leaders of the GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova) sub-regional group at NATO's 50th anniversary summit in Washington in April 1999. Their presence at the summit was all the more galling for Moscow given the ongoing NATO military intervention over Kosovo and Russia's consequent refusal to attend the celebrations.
130. The main difficulty with the Baku-Ceyhan option is the sheer expense involved in building the pipeline through rugged mountain terrain.
131. The term 'regional superpower' is used by Leon Aron in 'The Foreign Policy Doctrine of Postcommunist Russia and its Domestic Context', in Michael Mandelbaum (ed.), The New Russian Foreign Policy (Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, Washington, 1998), p. 33.
132. The liberal historian, Yuri Afanasyev, refers in similar terms to the 'foxhole mentality' - 'Russian Reform Is Dead', Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 2, March/April 1994, p. 23.
133. For example, it was the Foreign Intelligence Service which, under Primakov's leadership, presented the first significant detailed criticism of NATO enlargement and its allegedly adverse effects on Russia (see Yevgenii Primakov, 'Opravdano li rasshirenie NATO?', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 26 November 1993, pp. 1, 3.
134. 'Vladimir Putin, Russia's post-cold-warrior', The Economist, 8 January 2000, p. 45.
135. It is true that Putin secured Duma ratification of START-2 and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in April 2000. However, the government's prime motivation here appears to have been to preempt criticism of Russian disarmament efforts by the Non-Nuclear Weapons States (NNWS) at the Sixth Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in New York later that month. Certainly, Russian ratification of the CTBT, belated though it was, contrasted favourably with the US Senate's resounding rejection of the same in October 1999.
136. See Sergei Agafonov, '10 dnei chuzhoi voiny, kotorye potryasli Rossiyu', Novye izvestiya, 2 April 1999, p. 1.
137. See 'Vladimir Putin Believes in Positive Development of Russian-US Relations', 24 December 2001, http://english.pravda.ru/world/2001/12/24/24294.html.
138. At the NATO-Russia summit in May 2002, Putin and the leaders of the 19 alliance member-states issued a formal declaration, 'NATO-Russia Relations: A New Quality'. Although the document deals mostly in generalities, it also identifies a number of areas for enhanced cooperation, including the struggle against international terrorism, crisis management, non-proliferation, and arms control and confidence-building measures.
139. 'Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Formation of a New International Order', Yeltsin-Jiang summit statement, Rossiiskie vesti, 25 April 1997, p. 2.
140. According to a 1998 study by Dean Wilkening, the Russian strategic force would be 'largely obsolete by 2005, with the exception of the bomber force' - 'The Future of Russia's Strategic Nuclear Force', Survival, vol. 40, no. 3, 1998, p. 101.
141. See also Joseph Cirincione with Jon B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals:Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, 2002), pp. 108-9.
142. At the 1815 Congress of Vienna following the defeat of Napoleon, the ('Concert' of) major powers - Russia, Britain, Prussia, Austria-Hungary - agreed to divide up Europe and work together in preserving autocracy and Christianity against reformist/revolutionary tendencies on the continent.
143. It is ironic that Kozyrev, not Primakov, was the first major Russian advocate of multipolarity, believing, furthermore, that it had already emerged - see 'Rossiya i SShA: Partnerstvo ne prezhdevremenno, a zapazdyvaet', Izvestiya, 11 March 1994, p. 3. The difference between the two, however, was that Kozyrev's vision of multipolarity was cooperative rather than competitive or 'counterbalancing'.
144. See Sergei Karaganov, 'Novaya vneshnyaya politika', Moskovskie novosti, no. 8, 29 February-6 March 2000, pp. 5, 11.
145. In his April 2002 address to the Federal Assembly, Putin took the opportunity to announce the end of Cold War confrontation: 'After 11 September of last year, many, very many people in the world understood that the Cold War is over. They saw that we have other threats now, that a new war is on, a war against international terror' (http://www.great-britain.mid.ru/GreatBritain/prezident.htm).
146. Under Article I of the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, both parties undertake to reduce the aggregate of strategic warheads to 1,700-2,200 by 31 December 2012. The fiction of the 'binding' nature of the agreement is exposed, however, by the provision in Article IV that '[e]ach Party, in exercising its national sovereignty, may withdraw from this Treaty upon three months written notice to the other Party.'
147. The demographic imbalance along the Russian-Chinese border is generally estimated to be around 6.8 million people (and declining) in the Russian Far East against 130 million inhabitants in the adjoining Chinese provinces.
148. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, 'The Premature Partnership', Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 2, March/April 1994, p. 74;
149. also Richard Pipes, 'Is Russia Still an Enemy?', Foreign Affairs, vol. 76, no. 5, September/October 1997, p. 71.
150. During a visit to Uzbekistan in December 1999, Putin explicitly denied that Russia viewed the former Soviet Union as a 'sphere of influence' - see Arkady Dubnov in Vremya MN, 16 December 1999, p. 6 (in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, vol. 51, no. 50, 1999, p. 16).
151. Especially notable in this regard were the reciprocal visits between Putin and Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski in 2001. Putin described his visit to Warsaw in January that year as a 'decisive turning point towards developing a platform for moving our relations forward (http://news.awse.com/17-Jan-2002/Politics/7316.htm).
152. Thus, Presidents Putin and Kuchma have met officially on around 20 occasions; Russian capital dominates the Ukrainian economy; and pro-Russian (and anti-Western) views are increasingly aired on television and even in official statements. See Nigel Pemberton, 'Russia and the West Compete over Ukraine's Foreign Orientation in the Post-Kuchma Era', RFE/RL NEWSline, 29 March 2002, http://www.rferl.com/newsline/2002/03/5-NOT/not-290302.asp.
153. See Dmitri Trenin, 'After Putin Has Spoken', Helsingin Sanomat, 1 October 2001 (http://www.carnegie.ru/russian/attack/experts.htm). By this time, the leaders of the frontline Central Asian states - Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - had already indicated to Washington that they would welcome an American military presence in their countries.
154. The 2000 Military Doctrine noted, for example, that 'the threat to Russia and its allies of direct military aggression in its traditional forms had diminished thanks to positive changes in the international situation' - 'Voennaya doktrina Rossiiskoi Federatsii', Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, no. 15, 26 April-11 May 2000, p. 4.
155. As reflected in the struggle over spending priorities during 2000-01 between the then Defence Minister, Igor Sergeev, and the Chief of the General Staff, Anatolii Kvashnin. As a former head of the Strategic Missile Forces, Sergeev strongly favoured maintaining and upgrading Russia's nuclear weapons capability; Kvashnin, in charge of the North Caucasus military district during the 1994-6 Chechen war, instead emphasized the importance of building up the country's conventional military capacities which had become severely degraded since Soviet times.
156. The Russian General Staff's planning for military exercises in the spring of 2001 was based on the traditional scenario of a large-scale, multi-front war against the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. See Alexander Golts, 'The Russian military's exercise in futility', The Russia Journal (online edition), 24 February-2 March 2001, http://www.trj/ru/weekly/pdfs/100_18.pdf.
157. See Ivan Rybkin, 'O kontseptsii natsionalnoi bezopasnosti Rossii', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 29 April 1997, pp. 1-2.
158. See 'Kontseptsiya natsionalnoi bezopasnosti ...', Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, no. 1, 14-20 January 2000, p. 1.
159. In September 1999 two massive bomb attacks took place against apartment blocks in south Moscow. In both cases, the buildings collapsed with major loss of life. Although no clear proof of Chechen involvement was produced, Russian elite and public opinion united in blaming Chechen terrorist groups for the incidents.
160. Following a meeting with Russian security chiefs in Sochi on 22 September 2001, Putin asserted that Russia had been the first to propose that the global community unite in the fight against international terrorism. See http://english.pravda.ru/politics/2001/09/22/15922.html.
161. This motif was popular well before 11 September 2001. In an address to the Council of Europe in January 2000, Igor Ivanov depicted Russia as the defender of Europe's 'common borders' against 'a barbarian invasion of international terrorism that is persistently and systematically working to create an axis of influence: Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans' - see Dmitrii Kosyrev, 'PACE dala Rossii ispytatelny srok', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 28 January 2000, p. 6.
162. In addressing the German Bundestag on 25 September 2001, Putin emphasized the universal nature both of international terrorism and the means that should be employed to confront it (http://english.pravda.ru/politics/2001/09/26/16209.html).
163. At Putin's invitation NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson visited Moscow in February 2002.
164. Interestingly, Kozyrev argued this point in relation to the first wave of NATO enlargement - see 'Partnership or Cold Peace?', Foreign Policy, no. 99, Summer 1995, p. 12.
165. See Jean-Christophe Peuch, 'Duma Backtracks On Georgia But Maintains Pressure', Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report, 6 March 2002, http://www.rferl. com/nca/features/2002/03/06032002092252.asp.
166. See Alexei Arbatov, 'A Russian-U.S. Security Agenda', Foreign Policy, no. 104, Fall 1996, p. 107.
167. See note 61, chapter 4.
168. See Igor Ivanov's comments to the press following discussions with the EU 'troika' in Madrid, 2 April 2002 (Diplomaticheskii vestnik, no. 5, May 2002, p. 21).
169. Andrei Kokoshin, Deputy Defence Minister under Yeltsin, has noted that in the 1980s Soviet military planners were already moving away from the principle of exact 'military-strategic parity' towards more general ideas of 'strategic stability' based on adequate deterrent capabilities - see Andrei Kokoshin, Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917-91 (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1998), p. 141.
170. During 1999 MFA officials consistently indicated to me that the Russian government would be pleased to see a START-3 benchmark as low as 1,000 warheads. Unfortunately, the Americans had shown little interest in such proposals.
171. See Alexei Arbatov, The Transformation of Russian Military Doctrine: Lessons Learned from Kosovo and Chechnya, Marchall Center Papers, no. 2 (George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 2000), p. 16.
172. During 1999, my MFA sources consistently dismissed the possibility that American deployment of a national missile defence system could materially affect the Russia-US strategic balance.
173. Putin has been very careful to avoid any suggestion that China could emerge one day as a major nuclear weapons power (and therefore directly threaten Russia). Instead, he has pitched the argument in positive terms - The Russia-China relationship as a crucial element in an 'arc of stability' involving the United States and Western Europe as well. See interview with the Jianmin Zhibao newspaper on 4 June 2002 (http://www.putin.ru/status.asp).
174. Thus, in his first press conference as foreign minister, Primakov listed the defence of territorial integrity at the head of Russia's foreign policy priorities - 'Primakov nachinaet s SNG', Moskovskie novosti, no. 2, 14-21 January 1996, p. 13. See also the 'General Propositions' section in the 2000 Foreign Policy Concept ('Kontseptsiya natsionalnoi bezopasnosti ..., p. 1).
175. Following the Khasavyurt accords of August 1996, Chechnya became independent in all but name, a state of play that lasted until the second post-Soviet Chechen campaign was launched in September 1999.
176. It used to be argued that the disputed islands were of key strategic importance in that their possession allowed the Soviet/Russian Pacific nuclear submarine fleet safe passage in and around the Sea of Okhotsk. These days, however, such considerations are no longer relevant, and are notably absent in Moscow's arguments for retaining the islands.
177. Vladimir Lukin made this point to the author in early 1999.
178. This concern dates back a century. Petr Stolypin, Prime Minister under Tsar Nicholas II, was especially mindful of the problem and sought to alleviate it by actively encouraging migration to the RFE. See Alexander Lukin, 'Rossiya-Kitai', Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn, no. 12, 2001, p. 80.
179. Under the 1860 Treaty of Peking China formally ceded most of the southern part of the Russian Far East (Khabarovsk, Primorye, Amur, Birobidzhan regions).
180. See Dov Lynch, Russian Peacekeeping Strategies in the CIS: the Cases of Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan (St Antony's, RIIA, Macmillan Press and St Martin's Press, Basingstoke and New York, 2000), p. 4.
181. The 'format-20' idea is essentially about enshrining Russia's 'equality' within the Russia-NATO Council; this in lieu of the old 19 + 1 formula which Moscow (rightly) saw as excluding it from NATO decision-making processes.
182. The presence of important Russian economic interests in Iraq makes a flexible stance even more imperative. After all, Moscow wants to be able to work with whatever regime is in power in Baghdad.
183. See 'Kontseptsiya natsionalnoi bezopasnosti ...', p. 6.
184. Given its central location between Europe and Asia, it may be more accurate to speak in Huntingtonian terms of Russia being situated along a civilizational faultline rather than on the periphery as such.
185. The expression 'moral-civilizational mainstream' is of course somewhat arbitrary. Here it refers to the loose amalgam of Western humanistic beliefs and values originating in the 18th-century Enlightenment.
186. At various times in Russian history, there have been experiments in what might very loosely be called 'democratization', most notably the establishment in 1864 of the zemstva, or local assemblies of self-government. Yet these were hardly democratic institutions in any meaningful sense, being dominated by the local nobility as well as facing constant checks on their functions from the central authorities. See Orlando Figes' The People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England, 1998), pp. 39, 51-2.
187. The 1917 Revolution is perhaps the one example in Russian history where one can make a (partial) case that popular power overthrew a ruling regime. It is worth pointing out that in post-Soviet Russia, unlike in Ukraine, the opposition has never managed to defeat the incumbent power - quite a notable non-achievement in light of the political and socio-economic troubles of the past decade.
188. The notion of 'confidence in tomorrow's day' (uverennost v zavtrashnem dne) was a very common theme of the Brezhnev period, contrasting the stability of Soviet life to the uncertainty and hardship of the masses in capitalist countries - see Leonid Brezhnev, 'Delo Lenina zhivet i pobezhdaet' (speech on the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth), Pravda, 22 April 1970, p. 3.
189. Such stereotypes are reinforced by the Russian literary canon, which abounds in idealistic but ineffectual characters.
190. See Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England, 1994), p. 118; also Vladimir Lukin, 'Our Security Predicament', Foreign Policy, no. 88, Fall 1992, p. 75.
191. Vladimir Lukin, 'Our Security Predicament', Foreign Policy, no. 88, Fall 1992, p. 75
192. Lukin, 'Our Security Predicament', p. 65.
193. In noting that Russia 'stands on the boundary between the post-modern and modern and even pre-modern world', Dmitri Trenin argues that its 'only rational option is to fully stress Russia's European identity and engineer its gradual integration into a Greater Europe ... a clear pro-Europe choice would facilitate the country's modernization, its adjustment to the 21st century world' - The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and Globalization (Carnegie Moscow Center, 2001, p. 319).
194. See 'EU-Russia Economic and Trade Relations: An Overview', European Commission, Brussels, 21 May 2001 - http://europa.eu.int/comm/trade/bilateral/russia/rus_ovw.htm.
195. While Europe is Russia's largest energy client, the United States - and its dominating influence in the global energy market - remains the key player for Moscow in this as in other fields.
196. See Thomas Graham, 'U.S.-Russian Relations', Wilton Park conference paper, 15 March 2001, pp. 3-4.
197. See note 39, chapter 2.
198. See, for example, Putin's comments on the subject in his Bundestag speech of September 2001 - http://english.pravda.ru/politics/2001/09/26/16209.html.
199. Even liberal commentators have been inclined to see Western government criticisms of the Chechen war as being largely for a domestic audience - see Maksim Yusin, 'Golos Ameriki - "Rossiya dorogo zaplatit" za Chechnyu', Izvestiya, 8 December 1999, p. 1.
200. See Elena Korop, 'A klimat u vas khoroshii', Izvestiya, 1 October 2002, p. 6. Despite the improved business climate, however, annual foreign direct investment remains very low and even declined in 2001 to US$4 billion (compared to USD 4.4 billion in 2000) - 'The Russian Economy in June 2002', Russia-Eurasia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), http://www.csis.org/ruseura/rus_econ0206.htm.
201. Such as the 11th-hour exclusion of Alexander Rutskoi from the Kursk gubernatorial elections, and the transfer of the infamous governor of Primorskii krai, Yevgenii Nazdratenko, to head the State Fisheries Committee in February 2001.
202. See, for example, comments by Igor Ivanov cited in Dmitrii Gornostaev, 'Eltsin nameren ubedit zapad', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 18 November 1999, p. 1.
203. There is a common perception in Moscow that the main reason why Putin targeted Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky was that they were intimately involved in politics, unlike the other big oligarchs. Berezovsky played a kingmaking (or preserving) role with Yeltsin and in supporting the Putin succession, while Gusinsky's media outlets - in particular, his television channel NTV - had greatly irritated the President with its critical coverage of the Chechen war during 2000.
204. See note 22, chapter 2.
205. The notable exception to this general rule-of-thumb is the continuing American criticism of religious restrictions in Russia.
206. Vladimir Baranovsky refers in this context to Russia's 'instinctive impulse to reestablishing itself as a special player, "not-like-the-others"' - 'Russia: a part of Europe or apart from Europe?', International Affairs, vol. 76, no. 3, 2000, p. 451.
207. Some Bush administration officials have admitted privately to concerns about the 'reversibility' of the recent progress in Russian-American relations.
208. In this connection, a senior Foreign Ministry official emphasized to a Western diplomat of my acquaintance the importance of 'expectation management', including being able 'to agree to disagree in a civilized way'.
209. As Sergei Ivanov put it, '[t]he essence of our proposals consists of creating a new mechanism of equal relations between the NATO countries and Russia' - see Kathleen Knox, 'Officials Call For Shift In Relations With NATO', Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 21 November 2001.
210. Although it is perhaps unlikely that Moscow would be inclined to use such powers (even if feasible) in the case of an American attack on Iraq, there are other situations where the question would be much more problematic, for example, in the Balkans or with Iran 11 Dmitri Trenin, '"Osennii marafon" Vladimira Putina i rozhdenie Rossiiskoi vneshnepoliticheskoi strategii', Brifing Moskovskogo Tsentra Karnegi, 15 November 2001, p. 6.
211. Boris Yeltsin, 'Obshchee prostranstvo bezopasnosti', address to the Budapest OSCE summit, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 7 December 1994, p. 1.
212. As one senior MFA official put it, he was now experiencing his fourth détente in Russia-West relations - the first being the original Nixon-Brezhnev détente of the early 1970s; the second, Gorbachev's 'new thinking' in foreign policy; and the third, Yeltsin's pursuit of 'strategic partnership' following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
213. See Grigory Yavlinsky's speech at the Carnegie Endowment, Washington (note 35, chapter 5) - http://www.ceip.org/files/events/Yavlinskytranscript013102.asp.
214. See text of Putin's televised speech on 24 September 2001 - http://english.pravda. ru/politics/2001/09/25/16106.html.
215. See Trenin, 'After Putin Has Spoken', Helsingin Sanomat, 1 October 2001 (note 24, chapter 5).
216. In his speech at the Carnegie Endowment, Yavlinsky remarked: '... for Mr Putin to make the consensus is not a very difficult thing. He's simply saying, this is the consensus ... And this is the consensus. The same with Gorbachev. The same ... with Yeltsin. This is the Russian tradition ...' - http://www.ceip.org/files/events/Yavlinskytranscript013102.asp.
217. One need only recall Yeltsin's active role in the 1997 Krasnoyarsk and 1998 Kawana summits with Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto. On his moderating impact on Russian policy over Kosovo, see Gennadii Sysoev, 'Rossiiskie generaly protiv mira v Yugoslavii', Kommersant, 5 June 1999, p. 1.
218. Witness the equal status of Sergei Ivanov and the MOD in the joint ministerial group on strategic security - see note 8, chapter 3.
219. Remarks at a joint question-and-answer session with George W. Bush at St Petersburg University, 25 May 2002, http://www.putin.ru/status.asp.
220. http://www.great-britain.mid.ru/GreatBritain/prezident.htm.
221. http://www.great-britain.mid.ru/GreatBritain/prezident.htm.
222. At the joint press conference on 24 May 2002 following the Russia-USA summit negotiations, Putin insisted that Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran was 'not of such a nature as to undermine the non-proliferation process. Our cooperation ... is focused exclusively on problems of an economic character' - http://www.putin. ru/status.asp.
223. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, 'The Premature Partnership', Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 2, March/April 1994, p. 76.
224. It is notable, for example, that Moscow has sought to justify recent aggressive behaviour towards Tbilisi - threatening Russian military intervention in the Pankisi gorge - on the grounds that this may be the only way to deal with the problem of 'international terrorists' (i.e., Chechen guerrillas) on Georgian territory.
225. The contrast with the approach of the Yeltsin administration to NATO enlargement and the Kosovo crisis could hardly be more striking. In both these cases, the Kremlin threatened all sorts of 'counter-measures' but in the end did - and was seen to do - virtually nothing.
226. See note 17, chapter 5.
227. At a seminar at the Carnegie Moscow Center in May 2002, Vyacheslav Nikonov made the point that even a 'Potemkin' agreement, i.e., one containing little or no substance, had considerable symbolic importance. The existence of such a document amounted to formal American recognition of Russia's special status as a world power.
228. The declaration, 'NATO-Russia Relations: A New Quality', is less than three pages long, and sketches areas of cooperation and joint decision-making in only the most general of terms. The latter, for example, is to be 'in a manner consistent with [the parties'] respective collective commitments and obligations' (p. 1) - a get-out clause that allows NATO ample room for manoeuvre in deciding what areas and issues will be subject to joint decision-making.
229. An additional, if secondary, consideration here was the perceived Islamic threat emanating from Central Asia, in particular from the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
230. This is true even in the economic sphere, where the Putin administration views WTO accession - in which Washington is the chief external actor - as more important than its substantial (and growing) trade with the EU.
231. The latest encouraging development for Putin has been a marked softening in the French government's position following a meeting between Chirac and Putin at Sochi on 19-20 July 2002. See Marie-Pierre Subtil, 'M. Chirac abandonne toute critique de la guerre en Tchetchenie', Le Monde, 21-22 July 2002, p. 2.
232. I am indebted to Timofei Bordachev for drawing my attention to this apt term.
233. Doorstop interview in the Duma, 19 September 2001.
234. This was particularly evident in the wake of Communist and nationalist successes in the December 1993 Duma elections.