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

The Kremlin’s actions were designed to weaken the Georgian state and complicate its attempts to join the West, especially NATO. Russia established military bases in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, provides them with significant economic support, and plays an active role in their domestic politics. Both unrecognized states rely on Moscow for their future survival.

In August 2017, Putin pointedly visited Abkhazia to celebrate the ninth anniversary of its independence from Georgia—a week after US vice president Mike Pence visited Georgia to pledge support for Georgia’s struggle to regain control over Abkhazia. “We reliably guarantee the security, self-sufficiency, and independence of Abkhazia. I am sure that will continue to be the case,” said Putin. 45In recognizing Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s statehood, Russia has achieved three goals: making it difficult for Georgia to function effectively as a state, perpetuating the post-Soviet dependence syndrome, and forcing the West to acknowledge the limits of its influence in Russia’s neighborhood. The current Georgian government is seeking a less antagonistic relationship with Russia while maintaining its Euro-Atlantic aspirations, but there is little prospect that Tbilisi will regain control over its occupied territories.

Belarus

Russia’s only true ally in the near abroad is Belarus, the “last dictatorship in Europe.” And even that relationship is awkward and at times antagonistic. Stanislau Shushkevich, the westward-looking leader who signed the Belavezha Accords with Yeltsin, did not last long. In 1994, Belarusians elected Alexander Lukashenko as their president, and he remains in office to this day, having altered the constitution to accommodate his political ambitions. A former collective farm director, Lukashenko was the only member of the Belarusian legislature to vote against independence from the USSR. He is an idiosyncratic and repressive leader, unofficially known as Bats’ka (Daddy), and has enough support in the rural areas to remain in power. Early on he decided to ally with Russia, while the other post-Soviet states sought to escape Moscow’s embrace. He has sought to maximize his leverage by playing Russia and the West off against each other: “Belarus has been both an indispensable ally and ward of the Kremlin, depending on Russian subsidies to keep its economy afloat and an important buffer zone for the West against the Kremlin’s growing military aggressiveness.” 46

In 1996, Russia and Belarus signed the first of several treaties committing them to closer ties, culminating in the 1999 creation of the Union State. The treaty’s goals were ambitious—including setting up a common market and a common legal system, and coordinating foreign and defense policies. Lukashenko had a grand design: to take over from Yeltsin at the end of his term in 2000 and rule the joint Russian-Belarusian state. But Lukashenko was disabused of this ambition when Yeltsin named Putin as his successor. Once in the Kremlin, Putin was cautious about drawing too close to Lukashenko, especially during his first years in office, when he was reaching out to the West. The far-reaching plans for integration were never implemented. Nevertheless, Belarus joined the Customs Union, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), and other Russia-dominated multilateral organizations. Russia views Belarus as its westernmost line of defense against NATO. After all, Belarus was on the historical invasion route taken by both Napoleon and Hitler. Joint military maneuvers are routine; and in 2017, in preparation for the September quadrennial Zapad military exercises that simulate Russia’s response to an attack by a NATO country, it deployed large numbers of troops to Belarus, raising speculation about its future intentions toward Minsk.

There are tensions between the two countries, most notably about energy. Belarus depends on Russia for most of its oil and gas, which it purchases at heavily subsidized prices. Russia has used oil and gas supplies as a form of economic and political leverage with Belarus, cutting off gas supplies in 2004 and oil supplies in 2007 because of its displeasure with Lukashenko’s policies. Eventually Belarus had to make concessions to secure continuing energy supplies. Under pressure from the Kremlin, Belarus sold 50 percent of its gas transit monopoly Beltransgaz to Gazprom, leading Lukashenko to complain that the relationship with Russia is periodically “poisoned by gas.” 47The two countries continue to argue about energy prices and Belarus’s $425 million debt to Russia. Things came to a head in December 2016, when Lukashenko boycotted a joint CSTO-EEU summit in Saint Petersburg, apparently the result of disagreements over energy and trade but also because the director of a Kremlin-affiliated think tank denied there was a separate Belarusian identity and language and criticized Lukashenko for conducting overly independent policies. 48Just as some Russians question whether Ukrainian is more than a dialect of Russian and whether Ukrainians are a different nationality, identical challenges are raised about Belarusian identity and language.

Belarus remains an indispensable but quirky partner for Russia; it is essential to Russia’s post-Soviet integration projects, but it is led by a man who is a challenge to control. Its presence sustains the mythology of a distinct post-Soviet space with a Slavic core, and it has been one of Russia’s few supporters over the past decades. 49Were Lukashenko to be replaced by a more Western-leaning leader, Putin might well reassess the current relationship whereby Russia guarantees Belarus’s security but does not interfere in its domestic politics.

Kazakhstan

In July 2018, the Astana International Financial Center opened with great pomp and circumstance. Political and business leaders from China, Russia, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East gathered in the capital to hear President Nursultan Nazarbayev address the crowd as flashing colored lights and columns of smoke hailed the inauguration of the center. The AIFC is designed to become a regional financial and investment hub and will be governed by British law. Indeed, Kazakhstan has recruited a group of retired British judges to adjudicate AIFC cases. The inauguration of this center highlighted Kazakhstan’s main aspirations: to become Central Asia’s economic leader and to balance maintaining good relations with China, the United States, and, above all, Russia. 50

Indeed, Russia’s other key ally in the near abroad is Kazakhstan, with which it shares a 7,000 kilometer border, the second longest in the world after the US and Canada. Kazakhstan is the richest and most important Central Asian partner for Russia as it pursues four main sets of goals in the region: military security, regime consolidation, protection of ethnic Russians and the Russian language, and economic integration via the Eurasian Economic Union.

In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire conquered Central Asia—a region populated by both sedentary and nomadic tribes—and dispatched Russians to colonize the sparsely populated lands. During the Soviet period, the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic had the largest ethnic Russian population in the USSR outside the Russian republic. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev launched his ill-fated Virgin Lands Campaign, dispatching two million enthusiastic young Slavs to Northern Kazakhstan to dramatically boost agricultural production and solve the USSR’s food crisis—ultimately an unsuccessful and costly fiasco.

During World War Two, ethnic Germans and Jews were relocated to Kazakhstan, and together with the populations of the various gulags in the area, they became the nucleus of a new intelligentsia after Stalin’s death, making the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic a leader in science and medicine. During the Soviet period, a majority of Soviet nuclear tests were carried out at Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk site, creating serious health and environmental consequences for the local population and leading post-Soviet Kazakhstan to become a champion of nuclear nonproliferation. Indeed, in August 2017, the International Atomic Energy Agency opened the world’s first low-enrichment uranium bank in Eastern Kazakhstan to discourage new nations from trying to enrich their own uranium. 51Kazakhstan also houses the world’s first launch site, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, for joint Russia-US flights that launch US astronauts into space.