Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

The Clinton administration embarked on NATO enlargement with the first group of countries—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—believing it could assuage Russian concerns by offering Russia a series of compensatory incentives. These included joining the G-7 and offering Russia its own agreement with NATO, the Permanent Joint Council, which was signed in Paris in 1997. The PJC was designed to give Russia a unique relationship with NATO, whereby Russia had a voice, but not a veto, in NATO deliberations. In 2002, after the US and Russia had cooperated in the war in Afghanistan, the PJC was redesigned as the NATO-Russia Council. The PJC had operated on the basis of “nineteen plus one,” with Russia meeting NATO after NATO’s then-nineteen member states had taken decisions of interest to Russia. The NATO-Russia Council was supposed to operate on the basis of “twenty,” meaning that Russian officials would meet with NATO officials to make their views known before NATO took decisions, to ensure that NATO took Moscow’s interests into account. While Russia has sometimes spoken approvingly of this special relationship with NATO, in practice, the NATO-Russia Council has never worked very well, despite periodic cooperation on issues such as search-and-rescue missions, civil emergencies, and counterterrorism. Russia’s ambivalence about interacting with an organization whose agenda it had to accept and its suspicions about NATO’s intentions persist, and no amount of NATO attempts to create a more cooperative environment could overcome them.

Three weeks after Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, NATO launched its bombing campaign against Serbia, fulfilling the Kremlin’s worst fears. The United States and its allies hailed the enlargement as a victory for freedom and democracy. For Yeltsin, “NATO was making a mistake that would lead to a new confrontation between the East and the West.” 24

The split between Russia and the West came in the Balkans, the same cauldron of competing ethnicities and religions that had given birth to World War One. Much of Russia’s suspicion of and opposition to NATO was rekindled during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Yugoslavia was a patchwork state made up of historically hostile ethnic groups constructed in 1918 after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. During most of the twentieth century, it survived as a unitary state, first under the rule of monarchs and then, after the communists took over in 1946, under the iron hand of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. After his death, the presidency rotated among the major ethnic groups, but the system began to break down at the same time as the USSR opened up and Gorbachev unwittingly encouraged greater ethnic self-determination in the USSR.

After the constituent republics of Yugoslavia began to declare their independence, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic supported the Bosnian Serbs, who unleashed an ethnic war against Bosnia’s Muslim population, including the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. Initially, Washington hoped that its European allies would intervene themselves and halt the carnage in their backyard. But the Europeans could not agree on the modalities of a possible military operation, and under US leadership NATO intervened to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia in 1995. Russia reluctantly agreed to cooperate with NATO via the Contact Group for the former Yugoslavia, which was created in 1994 and met regularly to discuss the progress of the military operation. The US was determined to include Russia in NATO’s planning, although Russian ambivalence was clear. Russia consistently presented itself as the historical ally and defender of the Serbs. After listening to the US arguments about why Russia should support action against the Serbs, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev snapped, “It’s bad enough you people tell us what you are going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by telling us that it’s in our interest to obey your orders.” 25

Moscow invoked its special relationship with the Serbs—their common Orthodox faith and historical and cultural links—but nevertheless at this point agreed the Serbian leader had to be stopped. The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, negotiating the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian War, understood the importance of including Russia. What Russia “wanted most was to restore a sense, however symbolic, that they still mattered in the world…. Behind our efforts to include Russia in the Bosnia negotiating process lay a fundamental belief on the part of the Clinton administration that it was essential to find the proper place for Russia in Europe’s security structure, something it had not been part of since 1914.” 26The Dayton Accords created a three-headed government based on Bosnia’s three ethnic groups: Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Muslims). The peace was enforced by a multinational Implementation Force, in which Russian troops, surprisingly, served directly under an American commander, since they refused to serve under a NATO commander. This unprecedented military cooperation worked well. Yet today Russian officials recall the Bosnian intervention as inimical to Russia’s interests with a peace imposed by NATO.

NATO next intervened in the Balkans in 1999, during the Kosovo conflict. At issue was the right of the Muslim Kosovars living in Orthodox Serbia to declare their independence from Serbia and form their own state. At this point Russia’s position toward the alliance had considerably hardened, and Yeltsin himself was seriously ailing and facing growing domestic opposition to his policies after the ruble collapsed in 1998, causing an economic meltdown. NATO-Russia tensions in the former Yugoslav states were much more intense during the Kosovo War. Though Russia had been part of the solution in Bosnia, it had no intention of acceding to another NATO military operation to save beleaguered Kosovars from Serbian attacks.

In March 1999, as tensions between the United States and Russia increased, former Soviet intelligence chief and diplomat Yevgeny Primakov, by now prime minister, was on his way to the United States to discuss Kosovo, in the hope of de-escalating tensions. During his flight, he received the news that NATO had begun bombing Belgrade. He immediately turned his plane around midway over the Atlantic and flew back to Moscow in a rage. Yeltsin’s opponents were warning him that if NATO could bomb Belgrade, “Today Yugoslavia, tomorrow Russia!” “Wasn’t it obvious,” Yeltsin wrote, “that each missile directed against Yugoslavia was an indirect strike against Russia?” 27

Despite vigorous Russian opposition to the Kosovo campaign, former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin joined with Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari to broker a peace deal. But even as Chernomyrdin was putting his signature on the agreement, Russia and NATO almost came to direct physical blows at the end of the war. Contrary to the piece of paper Chernomyrdin had just signed, Russian troops rushed to the airport in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, and occupied it, before NATO troops had entered Kosovo. This was in direct contravention of the terms of the cease-fire they had just helped to negotiate. At this point the supreme allied commander in Europe, US general Wesley Clark, was in favor of NATO directly confronting the Russians. But British general Michael Jackson, who was in charge of NATO troops on the ground, told Clark that he was “not starting World War Three for you,” and eventually the crisis was defused.

The Kosovo campaign and its aftermath have been a consistent source of Russian criticism, from Yeltsin to Putin. Kremlin leaders have argued that NATO defied international law as enshrined in the United Nations Charter by bombing Serbia, including the inadvertent bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which caused an outcry in Beijing. Russians believe the subsequent history of Kosovo exemplifies the worst excesses of NATO imposing its will on Europe against Moscow’s core interests. After the end of the war, Kosovo was administered by a United Nations body. But by 2004, there was renewed violence between Serbs and Kosovars, and Ahtisaari again began to negotiate the difficult issue of Kosovo’s future status. Between 2006 and 2008, Moscow blocked UN decision-making on Kosovo, claiming that Serbia’s interests were being ignored and highlighting a possible Kosovo precedent for other unrecognized states, including the frozen conflicts in the post-Soviet space. It refused to support the negotiated plan after most Western countries decided that the only solution to the violence was for Kosovo to become an independent state.