Vol. 1, No. 6 (April 15, 2008)

Great power rivalry in the Caucasus after Bucharest

Stephen Blank, Prof.
Strategic Study Institute
US Army War College 


Tension in the Caucasus has steadily grown since 2005.  Russia’s undeclared war against Georgia includes a creeping annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, economic, trade, and energy sanctions, over flights, bombings, and intelligence operations.  In 2006, Georgia, not to be undone, contemplated military action to recover South Ossetia.  Meanwhile, its leadership is clearly unduly susceptible to using intemperate language and taking provocative risks.  Neither has it been fully successful in democratizing Georgia as intended.  Nor is this the only conflict in the Caucasus.  Armenia and Azerbaijan have regressed regarding efforts to resolve the stalemate in Nagorno-Karabakh.  Baku has raised defense spending 53% and both sides say that either Nagorno-Karabakh will never again belong to Azerbaijan or that it never will become independent of it.  These actions plus endless charges and counter-charges by both sides have only intensified the stalemate there.  Consequently, the Caucasus is more than ever vulnerable to great power rivalry; indeed, it is the only place in the CIS where actual military hostilities are easily conceivable.

At his 2007 speech to the Munich Wehrkunde conference Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed a diatribe against American policy.  He blamed US unilateralism for provoking a new arms race, destabilizing the Middle East, undermining international institutions, distorting the purpose of the OSCE, expanding NATO and supporting democratic revolutions in the CIS.  Thus Putin confirmed that the sources of Russian discord with Washington are military, political, and ideological (struggles over democratization).  However, he also ignored the fact that much of American policy towards CIS members stems from their and American apprehensions dating back to 1993-94 that Russia sought to restore an imperial like domination in the CIS, beginning with its intervention in the wars in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Moldova, and Nagorno-Karabakh.  Putin also overlooked the fact that his own government knows full well that many of its charges against America are utterly false, e.g. that missile defenses in Europe threaten Russia or that American action rather than local regimes’ corruption of the electoral process are directly responsible for the color revolution in the CIS.  Indeed, Russia has blamed America for these revolutions since Georgia’s Rose Revolution to conceal its own failed interventions in these states and the absence of any positive values that it can offer to the CIS.

Moscow’s charged rhetoric has only worsened with the advent of the issue of giving Ukraine and Georgia Membership Action Plans (MAPs) for NATO.  Russia’s storm of threats and charges directed at these two states and NATO sufficiently influenced Germany so that it blocked this from happening.  But typically Moscow’s hysteria (no other word fits) made it overreact.  Therefore NATO took the unprecedented step of stating publicly that Ukraine and Georgia will be members and that a Foreign Ministers meeting in December can take up the issue of granting MAPs.  Moscow also revealed its contempt for the sovereignty of these states.  At the April 4 meeting of the NATO-Russia Council Putin told President Bush, “But George don’t you understand that Ukraine is not a state.”  Putin further claimed that most of its territory was a gift from Russia in the 1950s; moreover, while Western Ukraine belonged to Eastern Europe, Eastern Ukraine was “ours”.  Furthermore, if Ukraine did enter NATO Russia would then detach Eastern Ukraine (and presumably the Crimea) and graft it onto Russia.  Upon returning home a frustrated Putin then said that Russia would give further help to Georgia’s secessionist provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, presumably to graft them too onto Russia.  Since then he has also given these provinces a formal legal status preparatory to declaring their independence or even annexing them to Russia.

None of this should surprise us.  Russian spokesmen regularly argue that Russia counts for more than do these small states, that its interests trump their intereststs, and that their sovereignty and independence is a sham.  Sergei Markov, Director of the Moscow Institute for Political Studies, told a Georgian interviewer in 2006 that, “Georgia has not yet deserved our respect for its sovereignty because it has proved unable to achieve an agreement with the Abkhazian and South Ossetian ethnic minorities.” Of course, Markov ignored Russia’s unremitting efforts to frustrate all efforts at conflict resolution.  Similarly Russia’s ambassador to Georgia, Vyacheslav Kovalenko said that “Russia wants Georgia to be independent, sovereign, and neutral.” Since Georgia’s political class unanimously wants entry to NATO and then EU, Kovalenko is demanding  that Georgia renounce its independence and leave itself vulnerable to Russia.  Similarly Russian diplomats at an OSCE meeting called Georgia “some province.” These actions represent a deeply held attitude in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and government.  Such double talk is not restricted to Georgia.  Neither was this an accidental one-time affair. 

And with that derogation of former republics’ present sovereignty goes the formulation and implementation of policies deisgned to undermine it in fact.  Self-determination then becomes a principle to destroy sovereignty.  In late 2006, Putin offered Ukraine unsolicited security guarantees in return for permanently stationing the Black Sea Fleet on its territory, a superfluous but ominous gesture since Russia had already Ukraine’s security through the 1992 Tashkent Treaty and the 1994 Tripartite Agreement with Ukraine and America to denuclearize Ukraine.  Putin’s offer also coincided with his typically “dialectical” approach to Ukraine’s sovereignty in the Crimea where he stated that,

The Crimea forms part of the Ukrainian side and we cannot interfere in another country’s internal affairs.  At the same time, however, Russia cannot be indifferent to what happens in the Ukraine and Crimea.

Putin thus hinted that Ukrainian resistance to Russian limits on its freedom of action might encounter a Russian backed “Kosovo-like” scenario of a nationalist uprising in the Crimea to which Russia could not remain indifferent.  Obviously,  

Moscow has the political and covert action means to create in the Crimea the very type of situations against which Putin is offering to “protect” Ukraine if the Russian Fleet’s presence is extended.  Thus far such means have been shown to include inflammatory visits and speeches by Rusisan Duma deputies in the Crimea, challenges to Ukraine’s control of Tuzla Island in the Kerch Strait, the fanning of “anti-NATO – in fact anti-American – protests by Russian groups in connection with planned military exercises and artificial Russian-Tatar tensions on the peninsula.

Russia is also augmenting its capabilities for such covert subversion by instituting a substantial program whereby it gives soldiers and officers in the Transdniestrian “Army” that occupies part of Moldova, Russian military service passports and rotating them through elite Russian officer training courses called Vystrel at Solnechegorsk at the Russian combined arms training center there.  As one intelligence officer in a post-Soviet republic told American analyst Reuben Johnson,

You do not try to cover up a training program of this size unless you are someday planning on using these people to overthrow or otherwise take control of a sovereign government.…  The facility at Solnechegorsk is used by Russia to train numerous non-Russian military personnel openly and legally for peacekeeping and other joint operations.  If then, in parallel, you are training officers from these disputed regions – officers that are pretending to be Russian personnel and carrying bogus paperwork – then it does not take an emormous leap of faith to assume that Moscow is up to no good on this one.
 
Clearly the post-Bucharest scenario can only entail intensified pressure upon them from Moscow whether it is directed at their gas and oil economies or at their freedom of action with regard to their defense and foreign policies.  In 2007-08, Moscow has sought to intimidate the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia to accept unfair terms either for the sale to them of Russian gas or for the sale of their gas to Russia rather than to Western markets where they would get a fair market price and to subordinate their foreign policies to Moscow’s dictates.  We see similar tactics being applied in Eastern Europe as well.

Similarly, Russia has intensified its efforts to project its defense forces into these states, most recently in its only partially successful efforts to get an air base in Uzbekistan at Navoi.  Russia is also pressuring the Caspian littoral states, among them Azerbaijan, to adopt its proposals for a Caspian naval force (CASFOR).  The purpose of CASFOR is to prevent Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and potentially a future Turkmen regime from carrying out the defense of their littoral and territorial waters in the Caspian Sea by their own means and by their own choice of foreign partners from whom they would receive assistance and training.  Rhetoric aside, in practice Russian leaders’ consistent actions display their belief that these states have or should have a diminished sovereignty just as the Brezhnev doctrine postulated for the former Soviet bloc.  Russian foreign policy still suffers from the imperial hangover, what the Tsarist statesman, P.A. Valuev, called the lure of something erotic in the borderlands.  Certainly Russian efforts to compel economic and military submission of Azerbaijan and its sister states to Moscow reflects Moscow’s continuing desire to create what Russian analysts themselves call a solar system where it is the sun and they revolve submissively around it.  

Accordingly, Azerbaijan can expect more Russian pressure upon its energy holdings and exports, more pressure to join the CASFOR, probably more support for Armenia in the negotiations over Nagorno-Karabakh, and more attempts to compel it to get rid of American influence and presence.  Most importantly, mounting Russian pressure will seek to prevent it from deciding to turn to NATO and to blacken its name and that of Georgia abroad.  Given the heavy police nature of the present Russian regime and widespread influence and subversion activities that it conducts across Eurasia, we can expect a significant increase in such “active measures” and efforts to subvert and corrupt CIS and European political institutions across the CIS from Belarus to Tajikistan to prevent the integration of the European members of the CIS with Europe.   

These Russian pressures are closely tied to the increasing despotism of the regime in Moscow.  Russian commentators themselves admit the domestic system is a softer version of Communist rule and cannot survive without exporting itself abroad and corrupting local political processes.  The answer, then, for Azerbaijan, Georgia, and other members of the CIS is to adopt their own consistent course of sovereign reforms.  Whereas Russia invokes sovereign democracy as a mantra to sustain its independence and desire for freedom from all restraints in foreign as well as domestic policy, governments like Ukraine and Azerbaijan can only survive by defending their sovereignty and by strengthening their resources and capabilities.  This course is only possible by a sustained long-term program of reform that will make their states more capable in economics, politics, and defense.  

These reforms will both strengthen their capacity for defending against foreign threats whether they are from Moscow or Tehran, and increase their domestic stability and attractiveness as partners to Europe and Asia.  They will also then possess more capability to resist domestic threats to security and stability.  That attractiveness to foreign partners and enhanced domestic stability ultimately represent the surest guarantees of their long-term security, stability and prosperity.  If they wish to avoid being objects of a new Cold War or great game then reform and regional integration, its natural byproduct, is these governments’ only true alternative.  Otherwise they will be divided from within and under pressure from without.  Lincoln’s abiding insight that a house divided against itself cannot stand applies as much to the domestic threats they might face as it does to the increased foreign threats, particularly from Moscow, that they will face and which already are part of this intensified great power rivalry in the CIS.

* The views expressed in this article do not represent those of the US Army, Defense Department, or the US Government.