Is Russia still a European power?

By David Hearst

MOSCOW: Put to one side the threats and outrage, the humiliation of a fallen military empire unable to crush a band of Chechen separatists in its back yard. Ignore also a Russian leadership that cannot argue consistently or achieve a single foreign policy objective.

As the bluster disperses, a Russian consensus emerges. It unites a pro-Western economist like the presidential chief of staff Anatoli Chubais, with a communist like Gennady Zyuganov and an extreme nationalist like Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

What Russia faces, for the first time since the 1814 Vienna Congress which decided the political shape of post-Napoleonic Europe, is its relegation as a European power. The Yalta conference confirmed the role of Moscow as a European power. But the map of Europe is now being redrawn and Moscow has no seat at the draftsmen's table.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was undoubtedly sold a dummy when he negotiated German reunification in 1990, getting only verbal assurances that NATO would not expand.

The Russian archives have recordings of negotiations between Gorbachev and James Baker, then US Secretary of State, and between the Soviet leader and the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl.

One transcript of a conversation between Baker and Gorbachev on February 9 1990 reads as follows, with Baker speaking: "We understand that, not only for the Soviet Union but also for other European states, it is important to have the guarantees that the United States would keep its (military) presence within the framework of NATO in Germany.

"If the United States would keep its presence in Germany within the NATO framework, the military presence or jurisdiction of NATO would not be expanded even one inch in an eastern direction."

The next day, Kohl told Gorbachev the same thing: "We consider that NATO must not expand the sphere of its actions."

There are many such transcripts, as Jack Matlock, the former US ambassador to Moscow, confirms. These guarantees were never written in a treaty, but they explain why Russia feels it has been deceived.

Russia withdrew its troops from Germany and dismantled half of its heaviest ballistic missiles. It believed, perhaps naively, in a new world order and a new European security system free of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

The threat the eastward expansion of NATO now poses for Moscow is not military. Few foreign policy strategists in Moscow believe that NATO forces will muster on Russia's borders. It is a political threat.

Alexander Konovalov, president of the Moscow Institute for Strategic Assessments, put it thus: "We are now witnessing the collapse of the Yalta system and that system must be replaced by something new.

"NATO," he added, "was a product of the Cold War and confrontation, the main task of which was, and still is, collective daffiness.

"What is absolutely clear today is that the enlargement of NATO is not going to provide a new system of European security." Russia "finds itself thrown out of the European process".

The second main threat that enlargement poses to Russia is where it stops. After Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join, who will be next?

In Estonia there are 500,000 ethnic Russians, in Latvia about a million of Slavic origin (including Belarussians and Ukrainians), and in Lithuania about 400,000. That makes nearly two million ethnic Russian in the Baltic states.

In Ukraine there are 12 million ethnic Russians, and Russian is first language for more than half Ukraine's total population - that is more than 25 million people.

The fate of ethnic Russians beyond Russia's borders is a political factor which talk about sovereignty and charters of human rights cannot obscure.

It remains for Russians a potential casus belli as explosive as any in the relationship between Serbs, Croats and Bosnians.

The West has not yet realized this. It still misreads the centripetal tendency of re-integration of the Slav states as another form of Russian imperialism.

It mistrusts any move towards a Ukrainian rapprochement with Russia.

NATO blunders into this ground at its and Russia's peril. Whatever wrongs the former Soviet Union perpetrated against Balts and Ukrainian speakers, Russia needs time to heal old wounds.

But moving gradually does not appear high on the agenda of the US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

-- The Guardian