Russia 15

 

 

Memorandum submitted by Dr Roy Allison

 

 

NATO foreign ministers agreed on 5 March 2009 to restore high-level diplomatic ties with Russia, including ministerial level meetings of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC), which were suspended after Russia's Russian military campaign in Georgia in September 2009. However, restoring formal dialogue is not equivalent to a normalisation of Russia-NATO relations. It also leaves aside the key question whether the NRC can serve as a substantive and productive channel for those relations in the future.

 

The break in NATO-Russia relations during 2008-09 may be compared to the longer freeze in formal relations between the two parties after the NATO campaign against Serbia in 1999. In the latter case the revival of serious dialogue depended first on jettisoning the previous format for this dialogue (the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council and replacing it with one that gave Russia a more influential voice (the NRC in 2002). But the new dialogue crucially depended also on a joint recognition of the need to respond to the imperatives of the new post 9/11 security agenda of global counter-terrorism, around which common proposals could be formulated, joint threat assessments be developed and perhaps even a spirit of 'cooperative security' be developed.

 

The present challenge is to overcome the grave deterioration of NATO-Russia relations since autumn 2008. Russia argues that the NRC is not fit for purpose. Contrary to their initial positive assessments of the NRC Russian officials now tend to belittle its achievements and to argue that it operates not as twenty six countries plus Russia. Moscow claims that a consolidated NATO bloc of states prepares its position on policies in advance, at the expense of Russia. Yet a shift away from the NRC to a new structure of cooperation (as happened previously from the PJC to the NRC) is not in prospect and anyway it simply may not be possible to accommodate Russian demands through such an institutional fix. Russia would be likely to call for a mechanism that can respond to major East-West controversies, in which Moscow could have some kind of veto rights.

 

Russia still presents itself as committed to global counter-terrorism (though for long it has focused mainly on challenges in the North Caucasus and Central Asia). However, while formally signed up to this agenda, the polarization between NATO and Russia since autumn 2008, as well as the expressions of vulnerability to potential Russian military threats by some NATO member states, especially the Baltic States, make it difficult to conceive of a way to recapture the cooperative promise of the NRC in 2002.

 

It is unlikely that a new NATO-Russia collaborative dynamic can be achieved through a security agenda focused on stabilizing Afghanistan, countering global nuclear proliferation and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability. These key security concerns will be the subject of serious and quite competitive negotiation. But Moscow will wish to use them to position itself as an 'equal' and indispensable negotiating party on global issues in bilateral talks with the United States rather than to use them to breathe life into the NRC.

 

Since its inception the effectiveness of the NRC and its various working groups has depended on the wider Russian-Western political climate. At the same time various 'goodwill initiatives' under the NRC seemed to be motivated primarily by the pragmatic effort to identify and kick-start common projects to foster cooperative midsets and the political will that might allow more ambitious forms of collaboration to follow. But Moscow is now disparaging of this kind of 'public diplomacy of partnership' of the NRC and does not seem to wish a continuation of project activity that has had little practical output. Moscow may place the joint anti-terrorist naval patrols of Operation Active Endeavour in this category. Alternatively, naval cooperation, as against piracy, may be approved as a minimalist and low profile form of military to military contact.

 

The military dimension of NRC cooperation is at odds with the characterisation of NATO as an adversary in Russian state controlled media, especially since September 2008. It is difficult to envisage the further development of NATO-Russia interoperability exercises, given Moscow's characterisation of its war with Georgia effectively as a proxy war with the United States and its current effort to draw lessons from that war for reforming its own armed forces.

 

Russian officials continue to present NATO objectives and the processes of enlargement as driven by an offensive strategy of geopolitical containment of Russia which has to be resisted. They have begun to describe the Arctic region as a new zone of confrontation and they present tentative NATO discussions on the protection of energy supply routes and pipelines as part of a wide geopolitical front to weaken Russia economically and even threaten its infrastructure. More specifically the Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and sometimes parts of the Ukrainian leadership are presented as a Western 'fourth column' within Russia's legitimate CIS zone of influence.

 

President Medvedev has extended this geopolitical assessment in referring to neighbour states as within Russia's traditional sphere of interests and in proclaimed that 'there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests'. He aroused further controversy by asserting that 'protecting the lives and dignity of our citizens, wherever they may be, is an unquestionable priority for our country'. On one level such language was probably intended to influence the attitude of traditional NATO member states over the risks of further NATO enlargement or granting Membership Action Plans to Georgia or Ukraine.

 

Russian intervention in South Ossetia in support of Russian 'citizens' in September 2008 has raised the question whether Moscow seeks to tactically exploit the provision of Russian passports for strategic purposes in CIS states. Attention has focused on Russian passport-holders in Ukrainian Crimea. In fact if Russia seeks to influence Ukraine's commitment to NATO it can do this more easily by working on politicians in Kiev, by playing on Ukraine's persistent inability to sustain firm ruling coalitions, as well as by leveraging energy policy, than by fomenting opposition in Crimea among Russian passport-holders.

 

Russia has sought to present its favoured regional structure of CIS states, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), as a natural institutional counterpart to NATO and has persistently called on NATO to establish direct relations with the CSTO to manage security problems in the Eurasian region. Moscow and CSTO officials call not only for NATO-CSTO cooperation over Afghan drug trafficking and counterterrorism, but now also for wider joint NATO-CSTO stabilisation activities in Afghanistan.

 

These overtures have made little progress. NATO is concerned that the multilateral framework of the CSTO could be used by Russia as a blocking mechanism against NATO activities in Central Asia. Russia's loose concept of a 'zone of CSTO responsibility' suggests indeed that Moscow seeks to insert itself between the Western alliance system and CSTO member countries, to force the latter to deal with the West via Russia and not directly. This issue is particularly sensitive because of the pressing need to determine how to best secure supply routes to Afghanistan.

 

The agreement by Russia and Uzbekistan to provide logistical transit routes to Afghanistan on a commercial basis for non-lethal supplies is presented by Moscow as a central plank of cooperation with NATO, as reflecting a common interest to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban, which transcends the antagonism generated by the crisis over Georgia or other major Russia-NATO disputes.

 

However, there are indications that Russia is seeking wider security policy trade-offs if this supply route is to be firmly established and broadened to cover military goods. Russian leaders seem to believe that NATO is becoming critically reliant on this new access route and may be exploring the broader foreign policy leverage this could offer. The Russian NATO representative, Dmitry Rogozin, indicated in autumn 2008 that the agreement on transit previously reached could be frozen if NATO support for Georgia continued on its current course.

 

Given the importance to NATO of predictability and reliability of logistical access to Afghanistan NATO should try to ensure that any transit arrangements are not hostage to fluctuations in Russian-Western relations or conditional on Western acceptance of Russian dominance under the guise of 'privileged interests' in Central Asia or elsewhere in the CIS region.

 

March 2009