Putin's Bold Move

As it did for so many other people, the world changed dramatically for Vladimir Putin on Sept. 11. Through his first 20 months as President, the Russian leader had vacillated among possible leadership options: whether to restore Russia as an empire, or to take an anti-American, anti-Western stance that could reheat the cold war, or to walk the long road into Europe. Following last month's attacks and U.S. President George W. Bush's declaration of a global war on terrorism, Putin chose the toughest and also most reasonable option. In siding with the West in its counterterror campaign — in effect, "joining" a struggle he has long maintained Russia was fighting alone — Putin made what may be a defining move in his presidency.

"Putin had made quite a few tactical decisions," says Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "But we had yet to see him make a strategic one." Now, Trenin believes, Putin has done just that, and is spinning virtue from necessity. Knowing that the former Soviet Central Asian republics would bow to insistent U.S. requests that they make their skies and military bases available for raids on Afghanistan and for humanitarian relief flights, Putin moved to make their agreement look like a concession — even an invitation — from Russia itself. He knew too that, with Washington sorely needing Moscow as a military and political ally, he would not find a better opportunity for rapprochement with the West. As Putin draws the wary, conservative Russian military and the general population to his side, he also knows that he will extract a price for his cooperation.

Russia's solidarity with the U.S. and its allies contains an element of "I told you so," given the country's own 1979-89 military debacle in Afghanistan and its fierce, ongoing conflict with guerrillas in enclaves such as Chechnya and Dagestan. It also comes at a time of heightened tensions with both Georgia and Ukraine, and as Russia's Central Asian fellow members of the Commonwealth of Independent States stand, perilously, at the center of the U.S.-led diplomatic and military onslaught against terrorism.

"We'll be allies and partners to the extent that we'll really be able to take part in decision making," asserts Putin. For Russia, that is a key psychological concern, says Mark A. Smith, senior lecturer at Britain's Conflict Studies Research Centre. "The Russians want recognition from the U.S. of their importance as security partner," he says. "They don't want to be seen as irrelevant. The widening of nato and the E.U. have confirmed their fears of being marginalized, pushed to the periphery." But, adds Smith, the U.S. has recently softened its tone and speaks of Russia as an ally — a role that may grow significantly, depending on how the current crisis unfolds.

"It's not nato that now expands to the east," writes Leonid Radzikhovski, a columnist for the weekly magazine Itogi. "It's Russia that is drastically expanding to the west." Directly or indirectly, Russia and the West may begin to sort out a broad range of issues: the expansion of nato, the proposed U.S. national missile defense system, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, nuclear weapons capabilities, Russia's bid for membership in the World Trade Organization, debt repayments to Paris Club creditors and greater Western "understanding" regarding Russian tactics in Chechnya. Critical, too, academic analysts say, will be any U.S. economic assistance in shoring up the five fragile Central Asian republics — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which border Afghanistan, plus Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan — and the establishment of a post-Taliban government in Kabul that would include a key role for the opposition Northern Alliance and thus would likely be acceptable to Moscow. Those who call the shots in Russia — the military brass — already feel unsettled. Fearing eventual establishment of an American-controlled Uzbek ethnic enclave within Afghanistan, the Russian generals may set up an ethnic Tajik one.

"It's in the best interest of Russia to make sure that the Central Asian states become really sovereign and stable," says Alexander Umnov, an authoritative Oriental scholar in Moscow. "Otherwise, Russia will never have stability along its Asian borders. New openings to the West will only enhance their stability." Says Dmitri Furman, director of the C.I.S. Research Center at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Europe: "It's quite obvious that the C.I.S. is disintegrating and Moscow will never be able to glue it back together once the U.S. steps in."

While scholars tend to accept that as a positive reality, many in Russia's military and political establishment do not. Russia, they say, can hardly reassert control over Uzbekistan — home to Islamic radicals of the worldwide Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (I.M.U.) — if the Americans are present. But Moscow does not intend to let go of Tajikistan, which it tightly controls, and is setting up a military base in the Tajik city of Khudzhant. "Russia is arming the Northern Alliance, not because it expects it to take over Afghanistan," says Oleg Panfilov, an experienced Central Asia hand in Moscow, "but because Moscow wants to use the Northern Alliance as a Central Asian Berlin Wall." The territory it controls, he says, would become a buffer zone securing the Tajik border.

"Russia," says Oksana Antonenko, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, "doesn't want to see the U.S. stay in any kind of semipermanent role, but it also doesn't want to be left dealing with any destabilization in the region. The best hope for destabilization not to occur is that the Northern Alliance play a leading role in whatever government emerges in Afghanistan." The issue is a sensitive one for Putin. "The Russians have been saying for years that they've been in the forefront of the fight against international terrorism," says Anne Aldis, research manager for the Conflict Studies Research Centre. "Now, they feel their fight has been hijacked by the U.S., because it's been hurt." Indeed, Putin has spoken of an extremist "United States of Islam" and of an "arc of instability beginning from the Philippines and ending in Kosovo."

The crux of the Georgian knot has long been the breakaway republic of Abkhazia, on the Black Sea. Over the past weeks, the Russian news media have been full of hyperbolic reporting about Georgian guerrillas and Chechen rebels linking up and breaking through from Georgia to Abkhazia's Kodori gorge — where 1,600 Russian peacekeepers separate Abkhazian rebels and Georgian troops. President Eduard Shevardnadze's government in Tbilisi accused Moscow's troops earlier this month of siding with the Abkhazian separatists and demanded that the Russians withdraw. Putin promptly agreed, provided Georgia assume responsibility for the consequences. Another thing Putin knows, then, is that neither the United Nations nor the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is likely to send a peacekeeping force to Abkhazia at this time. A Russian pullout would be fraught with the possibility that the Abkhazian guerrillas, well-armed for years by the Russians, would thrash Georgian forces.

"It doesn't really matter what is going on in the Kodori gorge," over which a U.N. helicopter was shot down by persons unknown on Oct. 8, says Alexander Iskanderyan, director of Moscow's independent Center for Studies of the Caucasus. "What matters is what is made of it, how and to what ends the situation is exploited by all sides." While the West "can't do very much in practical terms," says the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Antonenko, it has "quite a lot of leverage over Shevardnadze and his regime" and can pressure Georgia "to establish greater control over its own territory."
Ukraine, which has not had the best of relations with Russia in recent years, roused Moscow's fury when — in live-fire exercises earlier this month — it shot down a Sibir Airlines jet traveling from Israel to Siberia. Russian officials have toned down their initial angry rhetoric, "earning good brownie points in the international arena by being seen as grown-up," says Aldis. "Russia would have nothing to gain from rubbing Ukraine's nose in it now. I don't think the lesson has been lost on anybody in the Ukrainian military — but that won't stop the Russians from turning the screws in private."

Publicly last week, Moscow turned the financial screws on its military budget, announcing the closure of its Lourdes radar station in Cuba and Cam Ranh Bay naval and air base in Vietnam. At a stroke, the moves not only save Moscow hundreds of millions of dollars a year but also further improve relations with both the U.S. and China. For Putin, as he leads Russia along a new path, it was another way to be pragmatic in an uncertain world, one in which everyone needs friends.