Russian "national leader" Vladimir Putin met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in October 2007.
September 24, 2009
The reports of U.S. President Barack Obama’s private talks in New York yesterday with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have generally optimistically highlighted the two leaders’ apparently growing agreement on the need to step up pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. Speaking to reporters after the talks, Medvedev repeated a statement he’d made earlier in Moscow that “sanctions are seldom productive, but they are sometimes inevitable.”
I have long been skeptical of the Kremlin’s interest in cooperating with the United States on Iran and should confess that I remain so. Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote an analysis arguing that Moscow’s interest in weakening the United States and destroying the so-called unipolar world order trumped its interest in resolving the Iran dispute. The Kremlin views Iran’s nuclear program as the West’s problem:
Clearly, it is not in Moscow's interest to have a nuclear-armed Iran on its southern border with the capability of striking targets within Russia. However, this danger is remote -- it is hard to imagine a scenario in which Iran would risk total annihilation by destroying, say, Russia's Black Sea Fleet or leveling Volgograd with a nuclear strike. And that remote danger is made even more unlikely by repeated U.S. and Israeli declarations that a nuclear-armed Iran is "unacceptable." The refusal of the United States to pull the military option off the table means the worst-case scenario for Moscow, in the event talks fail, is not a mushroom cloud over Kuban but seeing Washington become bogged down in yet another military involvement with the inevitable further sapping of its strength and prestige. The facts that oil prices would also likely skyrocket under such a scenario and that Moscow would emerge as a "reliable energy partner" are probably also not causing Kremlin strategists to lose any sleep.
I still find this analysis compelling. So I was pleased to find the same arguments put forward
in an interview with former KGB turned Putin critic Konstantin Preobrazhensky on the website frontpagemag.com.
Preobrazhenksy is an old acquaintance who wrote occasional commentaries for “The Moscow Times” when I was the opinion-section editor there back in the 1990s and early 2000s. A lot of what he wrote then seems quite prophetic now. For instance, in December 2000,
he wrote: “Russia is once again on the path toward establishing a totalitarian state. Instead of communism, a sort of nationalism is fast becoming the ideology of this new structure, which is waging open warfare against civil society.”
In a July 1998 piece called “
A New Era For The FSB,” he rightly noted that the appointment of the little-known Leningrader Vladimir Putin to head the resurgent security agency was a watershed event, although he was uncertain then whether Putin would be able to overcome the resistance of the Moscow-based elites entrenched within the organization.
In his September 2 frontpagemag.com interview, Preobrazhensky throws cold water on the idea that Moscow will come to the United States’s aid on Iran:
Americans still cannot get rid of the illusion that Russians are thinking like them. For Americans, it goes without saying that Iran is a dangerous country which can hurt them with its nuclear weapons. But for Russians it is not so at all. They are fine with the current situation. Weakening America is a strategic goal of the current Russian regime.
Asked directly whether Moscow is afraid of Iran’s missiles, Preobrazhensky was direct: “No, it’s not.”
He goes on to offer informed speculation about the extent of covert cooperation between Tehran and Moscow. He concludes that “the intelligence services of Russia and Iran are cooperating. Not only on Afghanistan, but on America too. And on Armenia and Azerbaijan and also on the interior situation in Russia.” By the latter, he has in mind Russia’s Islamic minority.
I concluded my analysis of Moscow’s Iran policy last year with this argument:
While combating terrorism and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction are broad goals to which virtually every international actor can subscribe, they encompass myriad specific cases and issues, any one of which may be sacrificed to broader strategic interests. Moscow has declared the erosion and eventual replacement of what it defines as the unipolar global structure as a key security priority. Moscow's Iran policy is a clear example of a situation where, for the Kremlin, getting the right result -- an end to Tehran's nuclear-weapons ambitions -- is not as important as getting there by a process that promotes its broader agenda.
But Preobrazhensky’s formulation is a lot clearer: “Weakening America is a strategic goal of the current Russian regime.”
--
Robert Coalson
SM-3 missile launched from the destroyer USS Decatur in June 2007.
September 21, 2009
Is Moscow already having second thoughts about vocally embracing the U.S. Barack Obama's changes in Washington's missile defense plans?
Apparently so. The head of Russia's General Staff, General Nikolai Makarov, said on Monday that Russia has a problem with potential U.S. plans to place a radar system in the Caucasus. Makarov also said that Moscow has not backed off on its plans to deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, despite announcements over the weekend that it had.
It is still unclear whether Makarov's remarks indicate a change in the Kremlin's approach to Obama's missile defense plans. But it does raise questions about the extent to which the timing and circumstances of Obama's announcement on missile defense last week influenced Russia's initially positive reaction to the news.
According to my sources, Obama signed off on the Pentagon's proposed changes on Wednesday September 16 and planned to announce them on Friday September 18. This schedule would give the White House time to dispatch U.S. delegations to Prague and Warsaw to inform the Czech and Polish authorities that the administration was altering its missile defense policy.
But as is often the case in Washington, word of the decision leaked overnight on Wednesday, forcing the White House to move its roll out of the new policy forward by a day.
The symbolism of making the announcement on September 17, the 70th anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, was unfortunate. And in the interim between the leaks and Obama's official announcement, the White House briefly lost control of the story as it made its way through the European news cycle.
By the time of Obama's announcement Thursday morning in Washington -- which was already Thursday evening in Europe -- perceptions had already set in that Obama had abandoned missile defense.
As Gregory Feifer notes in his post yesterday, this led to triumphalism and crowing in Moscow about how the Kremlin forced Washington to back down on its plans. It also caused deep concern in Eastern Europe that the Obama was abandoning the Czechs and Poles in the face of an increasingly assertive Russia.
I spoke to James Goldgeier, a senior fellow the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of the book "America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11," shortly after Obama spoke on Thursday:
It is unfortunate that the president, secretary of defense, and [Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [James] Cartwright didn't speak [on Wednesday] because they were very clear in presenting the decision that the administration has made -- which is to construct a missile defense against Iran. But unfortunately for the administration -- because the decision was to do something different than the deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic -- the story that was out this morning on CNN and wires was 'Obama Scraps Missile Defense' or 'Obama Shelves Missile Defense Shield.' And that was incorrect.
It was indeed incorrect. But it was also this incorrect interpretation everybody -- including the Russians -- reacted to. And it will be very difficult for Moscow to walk back their lavish praise of Obama's decision now without looking rather silly.
It is hard -- if not impossible -- to view what Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and General Cartwright
announced on Thursday as a climb down.
The previous plan, to place an advanced radar in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland, was designed to counter a long-range Iranian missile threat that the Pentagon has concluded will not materialize nearly as quickly as they had previously feared.
Instead, the threat from Iran today stems from their development and acquisition of short and intermediate-range missiles that can already strike Europe.
In the short term, the administration plans to deploy dozens of SM-3 interceptors using the sea-based Aegis system as soon as 2011.
The system will be upgraded in 2015 and will include interceptors based on sea and land -- possibly even in Poland and the Czech Republic. A more advanced system would be built in 2018 and 2020, with the capability to intercept long-range Iranian missiles, should that need arise.
In place of the sophisticated radar the Bush administration planned for the Czech Republic, White House officials say they would use a more modest version that would be located in Turkey or the Caucasus.
Goldgeier described the administration's decision as based on "the threat we see" and "the best technology we can deploy against that threat."
Do General Makarov's tough comments today mean that Russia is about to take a harder line on the new U.S. plan? We should probably have a better idea when Obama meets Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in New York later this week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
-- Brian Whitmore
President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin play badminton at the presidential residence in Sochi
September 14, 2009
For weeks President Dmitry Medvedev appeared to be ascendant and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin seemed invisible.
Medvedev was moving fast against the state corporations, a signature feature of Putin's authoritarian modernization that tower over Russia's top-heavy economy. He seemed to be getting a handle on personnel policy by building a team of "civiliki," experts in civil law, to counter the influence of Putin's "siloviki." He railed against Russia's "primitive raw-materials economy" and "endemic corruption." And he slammed the security services for ineffectively dealing with terrorism.
And then suddenly, as my colleague and newly minted Power Verticalist Gregory Feifer points out in an earlier post, Putin grabbed the initiative back with one answer to one question at a meeting with Western journalists and Russia experts last week.
Asked whether he would consider running for president in 2012, Putin said he and Medvedev would "think together and consider the realities of our time, our personal plans, the political landscape… and we'll come to a decision."
Here's how Ivan Rodin described Putin's move in an article in Monday's edition of "Nezavisimaya gazeta":
As things stand, Putin handily won all the lost positions in one bold stroke late last week. The premier pronounced the tandem still existing and himself still playing the first violin in it. He said that he was making all important decisions - including who
would be the next president of Russia, for that matter.
Russia's fall political season is kicking into gear after the summer lull -- and what is really going on remains as opaque as ever. Were Putin's remarks a warning shot? Were they an attempt to clip the increasingly assertive Medvedev's wings? Or was the whole thing just a diversionary show, a fake conflict in which the president and premier are acting out carefully orchestrated roles for public consumption?
If the conflict is real, then how hard is Medvedev prepared to push for real power? How hard is Putin prepared to push back?
And if it is all a diversion, then what is the end game?
I have always maintained that whatever relationship and secret arrangements might exist between Putin and Medvedev, the conflict between their respective
teams is very real -- and has been intensifying over the past year.
Along these lines, political analyst Aleksei Makarkin told "
Vedomosti" that he did not expect an open clash to break out between Medvedev and Putin. But the two leaders' teams, he added, would continue to jockey for power.
Putin and Medvedev imply in their latest statements that both might run for president in 2012. The outcome [of the power struggle] will depend on the economic and political situation in 2011.
Let the games begin.
-- Brian Whitmore
Dmitry Medvedev speaks during a meeting on preparations for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics
August 26, 2009
It appears there is more trouble on the horizon for Russia's mammoth state corporations.
The daily "Vedomosti" reports that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is proposing that oversight of construction work for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi be taken out of the hands of the state corporation Olimpstroi (you can read an English-language version of the story, courtesy of The Moscow Times, here).
The report came shortly after the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor-General's Office announced that it was setting up a special unit to look into possible corruption associated with construction projects for the Sochi Olympics.
And it came just weeks after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev instructed Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika to open an investigation into Russia's state corporations to determine how effectively they work, how efficiently they use their assets, and the degree to which they are complying with the law.
As I wrote here, the first target of the probe appeared to be Russian Technologies, which is run by close Putin ally Sergei Chemezov.
So are the state corporations, a key cornerstone of the authoritarian modernization at the heart of "Putinism," really on the way out?
The state corporations -- Russian Technologies, the bank VEB, the nanotechnology firm Rosnano, the nuclear agency Rosatom, the Olympic construction firm Olympstroi, the Housing Maintenance Fund, and the Deposit Insurance Agency -- were given access to massive funds, were allowed to operate with little oversight, and were exempt from disclosure requirements.
As Kirill Rogov of the Institute of Economy In Transition wrote recently in Russky Newsweek, this suited the needs of Russia's ruling elite just fine during the flush years of Putin's presidency:
By and large, the state corporation is an ideal economic form for a bureaucratic and oligarchic state. It lays the legal foundations of bureaucratic absolutism and breathes new life into Louis XIV's famous formula 'The state is me.' It also brings the principle of a ' controllable market' to life: authorized bureaucrats (the new oligarchs) can manage state property almost like private property, whereas private owners (the old oligarchs) must coordinate their actions with the state.
Today, of course, money is getting tighter and the state corporations have proven themselves to be anything but frugal and efficient. Rogov says this is causing a fundamental rethink of the whole ideology behind what just a couple years ago was known as "Russia Inc.":
There is no doubt that the Russian authorities will have to revise decisions taken in the last years of Putin's presidency. At first, these steps will be half-hearted and clumsy and aimed at saving of at least a part of assets and positions in the economy that were taken by bureaucratic oligarchy. It will later be clear that the ideology of state corporations itself is in deep crisis and the only way out is searching for a new economic ideology.
In an article in
Russian Profile, Graham Stack writes that August offensive against the state corporations was preceded by a deluge of criticism directed against them earlier in the summer -- from Supreme Arbitration Court Chairman Anton Ivanov, from the Presidential Council on Legal Codification, and from the Audit Chamber and Anti-Monopoly Service:
Medvedev’s move comes just after a number of different bodies raised a chorus of criticism of state corporations in June and July. This points to a carefully orchestrated campaign to discredit state corporations and to the fact that the president has enough political backing across state bureaucracies to get his way.
Underlying this campaign, Stack writes, is a struggle in the halls of power between the "siloviki" clan of security service veterans who rose to prominence under Putin and "Medvedev’s liberal network of the St. Petersburg civil law scholars, nicknamed the 'civiliki.'"
The siloviki, most notably Chemezov and Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, want to preserve the state corporations and statist the economic model that supports them. The civiliki want them brought to heel.
And the key battleground, Stack writes, will be over the fate of Russian Technologies:
The big stumbling block will be what to do with the mother of all state corporations – Russian Technologies (RT) – the very first state corporation established in December of 2007. RT was originally based on defense sector exporters and their suppliers, but rapidly snowballed to include companies ranging from metallurgy to carmakers. The corporation is headed by the influential friend of Putin’s Sergei Chemezov. He is the man who single-handedly tailored the state corporation legislation to suit his personal goals, and is not likely to surrender his huge privileges without a major struggle.
But if the "Vedomosti" report about Olimpstroi is correct, it suggests that Putin is at least somewhat on board for Medvedev's campaign.
-- Brian Whitmore