Russia's search for collective
security By M K Bhadrakumar
In a terse announcement in the Black Sea
resort of Sochi, Russia last week signaled that
the time had come for it to revisit the doctrine
of collective security in the face of growing
encirclement by the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO).
After a meeting at
the summer vacation home of Russian President
Vladimir Putin at Sochi with the secretary general
of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO), Nikolai Bordyuzha, it was announced that
the regional security body (Russia, Belarus,
Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan)
proposed to transform into an "international,
multi-functional and universal structure".
Second, CSTO would form "collective
emergency reaction forces" with wide-ranging
functions that included responding to natural or
other disasters. Third, CSTO
would operate not only within its present
jurisdiction (consisting of the territories of its
member states) but also "outside this area".
These decisions will be formalized at a
CSTO summit in Minsk on June 23. In a modest way,
CSTO proposes to follow NATO's lead as a
collective security alliance with global reach.
An impression prevailed since the very
inception of the Commonwealth of Independent
States' (CIS's) Collective Security Treaty in 1992
that its purpose was twofold, namely to prevent
NATO's eastward expansion and, second, to provide
Russian military protection to some former Soviet
republics.
But the CSTO lacked credibility
for most of its life. NATO continued to expand,
while CSTO member countries often lacked unity of
purpose, largely due to ambivalences in Russia's
own "Euro-Atlantic" outlook.
The CSTO's
stated objectives are to ensure peace and to
preserve the territorial integrity of its member
states, to coordinate activities against
international terrorism, drug trafficking and
organized crime, and to provide immediate military
assistance to a member country in the event of a
military threat.
In June 2004, the CSTO
first proposed cooperation with NATO. But NATO was
determined that the CSTO ought to wither away in
the fullness of time - and nothing should be done
or said that might give the CSTO a habitation and
a name.
Even in the Afghan theater, where
the CSTO would have legitimate interests and a
certain utility, despite repeated Russian
demarche, NATO preferred to be the lone ranger.
Moscow also has taken note that regardless
of its sensitivities regarding any further NATO
expansion into the territories of the former
Soviet republics (especially Ukraine), Washington
is all set to get NATO to do precisely that. In
fact, US officials went on record this month that
Ukraine would be admitted as a NATO member by
2008.
Equally, Moscow realizes there is
really no "breaking mechanism" within NATO to
challenge Washington's writ on such matters.
French President Jacques Chirac is far too
preoccupied with the morass in French political
life to bother about US "hyperpower" anymore,
while German Chancellor Angela Merkel remains keen
not to annoy Washington.
US assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian
affairs Daniel Fried noted in a briefing in New
York last September that the "atmosphere has
changed" within NATO - "trans-Atlantic discord and
dysfunctionality" was no longer hampering NATO
decision-making.
"It is our intention now,
the intention of the United States, to take these
good atmospherics and put the US-European
relationship to work for common objectives based
on our common values and common assessments,"
Fried said.
NATO is also demonstratively
making an exception for Ukraine by not insisting
that before it become a member country, Kiev must
resolve the problem of the presence of the Russian
Black Sea Fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol,
or that it should do something about the manifest
opposition to NATO membership among the majority
of Ukraine's population. And at the same time,
Ukraine's membership of the European Union remains
highly problematic.
The newly appointed US
ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor (who,
incidentally, represented the United States in
Kabul as the "coordinator" during the US
intervention in 2001-02), almost claimed Ukraine
as a de facto NATO ally already. During the
congressional hearing in Washington on his
appointment two weeks ago, Taylor expressed
dissatisfaction with the agreement between Russia
and Ukraine over gas deliveries.
He said,
"If the new government [in Kiev] decides that it
wants to review the deal, then we [the United
States] would support such a step. We have already
made this known. We will provide assistance to
Ukraine on this question."
Meanwhile, in
an extraordinary speech at the Washington Press
Club last Thursday, the commander of US and
European forces, General James Jones, said NATO
was not "an alliance that is showing signs of
fatigue or irrelevance". To the contrary, this
year "is a pivotal year" for NATO, perhaps more so
than any of the past several years, he said.
The general spoke of NATO's phenomenal
transformation as a security organization: "The
future of NATO is not to be a reactive, defensive
static alliance, but it is to be more flexible,
more proactive." Beyond peacekeeping (and
peace-enforcing, as in Afghanistan and Sudan),
NATO will also work for "conflict prevention",
according to Jones.
NATO will increasingly
involve itself in the political decision-making
processes. Thus the agenda of the NATO summit in
November in the Latvian capital Riga includes such
topics as energy security, critical infrastructure
security, nuclear non-proliferation, the "frozen
conflicts" in the post-Soviet space, etc.
All the same, Ukraine's impending NATO
membership is a defining moment for Russia. As a
leading Russian political observer, Fedor
Lukyanov, wrote in the Gazeta, "This will almost
constitute the biggest challenge to Moscow in the
entire period of its post-Soviet relations with
the West ... the main trouble is not so much at
the practical level as at the ideological ... We
are not dealing here with the realization of a
plan, but rather with an unstoppable momentum that
supplants conscious future policy."
"One
of the fatal mistakes of [Soviet president
Mikhail] Gorbachev's leadership," Lukyanov wrote,
"was the fact that the Kremlin did not get the
organization that personified the 50-year-old
ideological confrontation eliminated. The Warsaw
Pact was dispatched to meet its 'maker', but NATO,
which was formed to oppose the USSR, was
preserved. And no matter what is said about NATO's
new character, no one will convince the Russian
generals and politicians that the expansion is not
directed against Moscow."
Furthermore,
NATO enlargement has exacerbated differences
regarding the future of the 1990 Treaty on
Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). The CFE
(which was designed to maintain a balance of
forces between the Warsaw Pact and NATO) has begun
to lose its effectiveness.
On Friday,
Washington issued the first explicit signal that
the US would not ratify the CFE's Adaptation
Agreement (signed in Istanbul in November 1999)
until Russia withdrew its 1,500-strong military
contingent and equipment from the Dneister River
region in Moldova. Announcing this, the US
official in charge of arms control, assistant
secretary of state Paula De Sutter, said NATO
sided with Washington on this issue.
Moscow considers any such linkage
"illegitimate and counterproductive". A question
mark has arisen over the further fate of the CFE,
which was indeed one of the biggest arms-control
projects in all of European history. An
international conference is going on in Vienna
until Friday to discuss the differences. Moscow
has warned that if the CFE remained unratified by
NATO, it may be forced to make "fundamental
decisions as to the future of the cornerstone of
European security".
The CFE was designed
to reduce conventional armaments further and on
the whole greatly lower the role of military power
as a factor in interstate relations on the
European continent. It prescribes enhanced
weapons-verification measures. For Moscow, with
the Warsaw Pact defunct (and with erstwhile Warsaw
Pact member states already having joined NATO),
the implications of the "non-ratification" of the
CFE by NATO are far-reaching.
If the US
would have its way, Moscow could not insist on
being kept informed or exercise its right (under
CFE) to verify the extent of NATO's military power
being amassed close to Russia's border. In
this context, Moscow began revisiting the doctrine
of collective security. The meeting of the foreign
and defense ministers of the CSTO countries in
Moscow last November was the first sign that
Russia would be "creating its own version of
NATO", as the Russian opposition daily Kommersant
wryly noted at that time.
Russian
officials have began sounding acrimonious in
recent months. Addressing the CSTO gathering in
Moscow in November, Igor Ivanov, secretary of
Russia's National Security Council, accused the US
and NATO of stoking tensions in the territories of
the former Soviet republics. The chief of Russian
General Staff, General Yury Baluyevsky, was quoted
as saying, "We are following NATO's attempts to
involve CIS states in the bloc's activity and to
weaken their relations with Russia."
Ivanov announced in April that Russia and
Belarus would start integrating their air-defense
systems by the end of the year. Ivanov also said
the CSTO would carry out large-scale military
exercises in the "Eastern European direction" in
June in which crack Russian units deployed in the
Moscow Military District and various kinds of
aircraft, including long-range AWACS (Airborne
Warning and Control System), would take part.
On April 22, Russia announced the test
flight of its new intermediate-range missile with
multiple warheads at Kapustiny Yar in the
Astrakhan region. Large-scale exercises were held
at the end of April as part of the unified CIS
air-defense system (in which Uzbekistan also took
part). On May 11, Ivanov said NATO had no
political or military reasons to expand further
into the former Soviet republics. Ivanov warned
that Russia would adjust its foreign policy and
military doctrine to meet the new challenge.
As the director of the Russian Academy of
Science's Institute of US and Canada Studies,
Sergei Rogov, put it, "This decision [Ukraine's
NATO membership] would be very significant for
Russia, because it could radically change its
relations with NATO for the worse."
Influential Russian commentator Gleb
Pavlovsky concurred that Russia was unlikely to
let Ukraine's accession pass by default.
Significantly, General Baluyevsky revealed
on May 18 that possible joint military maneuvers
of the member countries of the CSTO and the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) were under
discussion. In essence, this would be tantamount
to joint military exercises involving Russia and
its (remaining) allies in the post-Soviet space
and China.
Now comes the Russian statement
that the CSTO intends to assume the role and
character of an international organization that is
geared for undertaking operations even beyond
Eurasia. The SCO and CSTO summits in June are
without doubt invested with profound significance
for the international system.
M K
Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the
Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years,
with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan
(1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
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