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on russia
Quote:
Russia: we are ready for a new cold war
Relations with the west plummet as Kremlin recognises breakaway states
Russia's relations with the west plunged to their most critical point in a generation yesterday when the Kremlin built on its military rout of Georgia by recognising the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.
Declaring that if his decision meant a new cold war, then so be it, President Dmitri Medvedev signed a decree conferring Russian recognition on Georgia's two secessionist regions. The move flouted UN security council resolutions and dismissed western insistence during the crisis of the past three weeks on respecting Georgia's territorial integrity and international borders.
Last night, Medvedev accused Washington of shipping arms to Georgia under the guise of humanitarian aid.
The Kremlin's unilateral decision to redraw the map of the strategically vital region on the Black Sea surprised and alarmed the west, and raised the stakes in the Caucasus crisis. Moscow challenged Europe and the US to respond, while calculating that western divisions over policy towards Russia would dilute any damage.
Washington condemned the move. Britain called for a European coalition against Russian "aggression". Sweden said Russia had opted for a path of confrontation with the west, and international organisations denounced Medvedev's move as illegitimate and unacceptable.
"We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new cold war," Medvedev said. "Russia is a state which has to ensure its interests along the whole length of its border. This is absolutely clear."
While Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, accused the US, a strong backer of President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, of gunboat diplomacy by using its airforce and naval vessels to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia, Medvedev last night went further.
He said Russian forces were not blockading Georgia's Black Sea port of Poti. "There is no blockade. Any ship can get in, American and others are bringing in humanitarian cargoes. And what the Americans call humanitarian cargoes - of course, they are bringing in weapons," he told the BBC.
Last night a source close to the US embassy in Tbilisi said US warships had abandoned a plan to deliver supplies to the port. The USS McFaul had been due to arrive in Poti tomorrow after unloading supplies in the Georgian port of Batumi.
The Nato secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said: "Russia's actions in recent weeks call into question Russia's commitment to peace and stability in the Caucasus."
But Moscow oozed confidence that the western response would be mostly bark and little bite, restricted to sharp words and some tolerable diplomatic sanctions. "I don't think we should be afraid of isolation. I don't believe isolation is looming," said Lavrov. "This should not really be a doomsday scenario."
The Kremlin decision, prepared on Monday by the Russian parliament's unanimous vote in favour of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, is widely seen as presaging Russian annexation at least of South Ossetia, a poor, crime-ridden mountain region of only 70,000 people which has little prospect of becoming a viable state.
South Ossetia was the spark that ignited the crisis this month after Saakashvili launched a disastrous attempt to recapture the region and met a Russian invasion which crippled his country.
"Russia's actions are an attempt to militarily annex a sovereign nation ...in direct violation of international law," Saakashvili said last night. "The Russian Federation is seeking to validate the use of violence, direct military aggression, and ethnic cleansing to forcibly change the borders of a neighbouring state."
But senior Russian officials, from Medvedev down, launched a concerted attack on Saakashvili, accusing him of "genocide", of seeking to "exterminate" the people of South Ossetia, and of leaving Russia no alternative.
"This is not an easy choice to make, but it represents the only possibility to save human lives," said Medvedev. "Saakashvili opted for genocide to accomplish his political objectives. By doing so, he himself dashed all the hopes for the peaceful coexistence of Ossetians, Abkhazians and Georgians in a single state."
Lavrov said Russia's decision was "absolutely inevitable, short of losing our dignity as a nation".
Dmitri Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to Nato, likened the international climate to the summer of 1914 before the first world war, and compared the Georgian leader to Gavrilo Princip, the Balkan assassin who shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo.
Russia's decision to recognise the two regions effectively killed off the ceasefire and peace plan negotiated a fortnight ago by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy on behalf of the European Union.
Exasperated by Russia's refusal to observe the terms of the truce, Sarkozy has already called an emergency EU summit for Monday in Brussels. The meeting was supposed to chart a common EU position on Russia, but is as likely to expose Europe's dilemmas and divisions over how to deal with an increasingly assertive Kremlin.
David Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, said he wanted to forge "the widest possible coalition against Russian aggression in Georgia. We fully support Georgia's independence and territorial integrity, which cannot be changed by decree from Moscow."
But Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, while denouncing the Russian move as "absolutely unacceptable", said she wanted to keep dialogue running with Moscow.
Miliband is due to fly to Kiev today to express British support for the Ukrainian government, which fears it could be next in line for Russian pressure aimed at thwarting its efforts to join Nato.
Miliband is due to meet Ukraine's president, Viktor Yushchenko, and its prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, whose government is in a precarious position: seeking membership of Nato and the EU in the face of determined opposition from the country's Russian minority.
Under a lease agreement, Russia's Black Sea fleet is based on Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, increasing Russian sensitivity to Ukraine's westward trajectory and Ukrainian vulnerability to pressure from Moscow.
Miliband will make a speech today to a university audience in Kiev, in which he will laud Ukrainian democracy and warn Russia that its actions will cause long-term harm to its standing on the world stage.
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Russia: we are ready for a new cold war | World news | The Guardian
while the collective attention was being directed to the olympics then the next sporting events in the political nomination rituals, things have continued to play out around georgia, south ossetia, abkhazia--and poland.
it seems pretty obvious that the signing of the "defense" deal with poland is a far more significant factor than is being acknowledged here in the land of mediated superficiality. this article from 15 august outlines the deal and russian objections to it:
Quote:
Russia Lashes Out on Missile Deal
By THOM SHANKER and NICHOLAS KULISH
WASHINGTON — The United States and Poland reached a long-stalled deal on Thursday to place an American missile defense base on Polish territory, in the strongest reaction so far to Russia’s military operation in Georgia.
Russia reacted angrily, saying that the move would worsen relations with the United States that have already been strained severely in the week since Russian troops entered separatist enclaves in Georgia, a close American ally. At a news conference on Friday, a senior Russian defense official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, suggested that Poland was making itself a target by agreeing to host the anti-missile system. Such an action “cannot go unpunished,” he said.
The deal reflected growing alarm in a range of countries that had been part of the Soviet sphere about a newly rich and powerful Russia’s intentions in its former cold war sphere of power. In fact, negotiations dragged on for 18 months — but were completed only as old memories and new fears surfaced in recent days.
Those fears were codified to some degree in what Polish and American officials characterized as unusual aspects of the final deal: that at least temporarily American soldiers would staff air defense sites in Poland oriented toward Russia, and that the United States would be obliged to defend Poland in case of an attack with greater speed than required under NATO, of which Poland is a member.
Polish officials said the agreement would strengthen the mutual commitment of the United States to defend Poland, and vice versa. “Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later — it is no good when assistance comes to dead people,” the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said on Polish television. “Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of — knock on wood — any possible conflict.”
A sense of deepened suspicions — and the more darkly drawn lines between countries in the region — were also apparent in the emotional reaction from Russia.
“It is this kind of agreement, not the split between Russia and United States over the problem of South Ossetia, that may have a greater impact on the growth in tensions in Russian-American relations,” Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian Parliament, told the Interfax news agency on Thursday in Moscow.
South Ossetia is the pro-Russian enclave inside Georgia where Russia sent troops last week, following a military crackdown by the pro-Western government in Georgia.
The missile defense deal was announced by Polish officials and confirmed by the White House. Under it, Poland would host an American base with 10 interceptors designed to shoot down a limited number of ballistic missiles, in theory launched by a future adversary such as Iran. A tracking radar system would be based in the Czech Republic. The system is expected to be in place by 2012.
In exchange for providing the base, Poland would get what the two sides called “enhanced security cooperation,” notably a top-of-the-line Patriot air defense system that can shoot down shorter-range missiles or attacking fighters or bombers.
A senior Pentagon official described an unusual part of this quid pro quo: an American Patriot battery would be moved from Germany to Poland, where it would be operated by a crew of about 100 American military personnel members. The expenses would be shared by both nations. American troops would join the Polish military, at least temporarily, at the front lines — facing east toward Russia.
Russia has long opposed the deal, saying the United States was violating post-cold-war agreements not to base its troops in former Soviet bloc states and devising a Trojan Horse system designed to counter Russia’s nuclear arsenal, not an attack by Iran or another adversary.
Stop-and-start negotiations over the arrangement that was sealed Thursday had been under way for almost two years, with the Polish government reluctant to press the deal in the face of strong opposition — and retaliatory threats — from Moscow.
For its part, Washington had balked at some of Poland’s demands, in particular the sale of advanced air defense systems that were unrelated to shooting down ballistic missiles.
But in a sign of the widening repercussions of the conflict in Georgia, those concerns were cast aside, as the offensive by Russia’s military across its borders was viewed around the world as a sign of Moscow’s determination to reimpose its influence across the old Soviet bloc.
Polish officials, in announcing the agreement, said it would be presented to the National Legislature, although it remained unclear whether the American base would require a vote of approval.
The other half of the American missile defense system in Europe would be an advanced radar in the Czech Republic for tracking specific targets and then precisely guiding an interceptor to destroy a warhead. Likewise, that deal has been signed by the country’s leaders, and is awaiting debate in the Czech Parliament.
At the White House, the press secretary, Dana M. Perino, confirmed that senior officials had initialed the agreement. “In no way is the president’s plan for missile defense aimed at Russia,” she said. “In fact, it’s just not even logically possible for it to be aimed at Russia, given how Russia could overwhelm it. The purpose of missile defense is to protect our European allies from any rogue threats, such as a missile from Iran.”
The Bush administration, in an attempt to prove its sincerity and transparency, had invited Moscow to join as a partner in a continentwide missile defense system, sharing information and technology with NATO allies.
While Russian and American experts have discussed cooperation, senior officials in Moscow have kept up a nonstop stream of complaints about the system.
The agreement also poses potential political problems for Democratic critics of missile defense who would be fighting to cut financing for the program in the face of the specific request from Poland and in light of the Russian offensive into Georgia.
There is no such ambivalence on Russia’s periphery, where Moscow’s attack signaled danger, and offered logic for closer ties with Washington and NATO.
In Poland, the war in Georgia has dominated the front pages of newspapers, where it has been starkly characterized as Russian invaders attacking Georgia. For Poles, Russia’s actions also come as a vindication of Poland’s distrust of its former conqueror and was a warning about issues like energy security, one of the primary areas in which a resurgent Russia first began to exert itself.
“We are worried that we are facing, under the strong arm of Russia, a situation where some kind of understanding would be reached that Russia would be given a free hand in the region,” said Eugeniusz Smolar, director of the Center for International Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in Warsaw.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/wo...3E&oref=slogin
so first off, as much as i dislike putin, i have to say that i do not blame his government for reacting as it has to the poland deal---i think the parallel might well be the attempt of the soviets to put missles in cuba in 1962....
beyond selling expensive missle systems to poland, however, i am at a loss as to what rationale there could possibly be for this agreement apart from setting something like this into motion with russia---not the situation in georgia---but rather the "we are ready for a new cold war"
typically, the bush people felt no particular need to address this question around the 20th--i saw a press conference in which a question "what do you think the implications of signing this deal now?" was greeted with "we were working on this before"....
what do you think is going on here?
what do you make of the russian reactions?
who is driving this devolution? (this not in a conspiracy theory sense, but rather --- how do you explain this and where is this heading?)
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