PUTIN’S MÉNAGE À TROIS IN KALININGRAD

Over the weekend of July 3-4, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted French President Jacques Chirac and German Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder for a summit in Kaliningrad, supposedly to celebrate the city’s 750th anniversary. Putin conspicuously declined to invite Polish and Lithuanian leaders to this event, also ostensibly because it was a purely domestic event signifying Russia’s determination to support its exclave. This weak explanation provoked unusual official anger in Warsaw and Vilnius. Those governments saw the snub as retribution for Poland’s support for Ukrainian democracy in 2004-2005 and for Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus’ refusal to come to Moscow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in May.

However, this summit also served to realize the interests of its three principals. For Chirac it was another opportunity to trumpet his call for European unity and to further distance himself from the United States. Thus he announced that Russian-EU relations are important to the world. He also hailed Moscow’s “special role” in Iran’s peaceful development of its nuclear program. Schroeder was there to gain personal standing in his re-election campaign, ensure Russian gas and oil supplies, and seek Russia’s support for a German seat in the UN Security Council. Support for a Russo-German pipeline also represented the latest stage in Schroeder’s efforts to work with Moscow on a bilateral basis. And as is generally the case with such Russo-German rapprochements, the interests of Poland and the Baltic states, (in this case, obtaining transit fees from a pipeline through their territory or support for their resistance to Russian pressures) are sacrificed.

Certainly the meeting had nothing to do with domestic Russian issues. The trio discussed a range of international issues, the G-8’s agenda for its upcoming meeting in Scotland, Iraq, UN reform, including the Security Council, energy security, and, quite critically for Moscow, the future of its agreements on “four common spaces” with the EU after the failure of the latter’s constitutional referenda in Holland and France. The meeting also clearly represented Russia’s efforts to assert that its support is vital to the European powers who dominate the EU, and thus to the organization. Therefore Moscow could again chase after the elusive European bloc devoted to limiting American influence globally. In this endeavor Moscow, despite its failure to reform its own energy sector or to expand its capability to meet global demand and substitute for OPEC, will try to use its energy sector as leverage.

A second strategy continues what has become a very distressing policy, at least as far as Central and East European governments are concerned. Moscow, with reasonable success, continues to attempt to make side deals through bilateral relationships with EU governments at the expense of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states to secure its pretenses to hegemony in the post-Soviet space. In doing so it seeks to downplay as far as possible the need to relate to the European Commission Brussels. The governments in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and London are often tempted to play this game, because it supposedly magnifies their importance or allows them to make their own side deals, like Schroeder’s efforts to show that Russia trusts him.

This Russian policy is also connected with Moscow’s refusal to sign a border treaty with Estonia and continuing efforts to pressure the EU to lean on the Baltic states to grant their Russian minority a favored status and allow Russia a privileged status so that it can intervene in other countries’ domestic arrangements. Putin has played this game before, but it is always the Europeans who end up with the responsibility for either provoking Washington or for failing to make stronger contributions to the stability and security of Eastern Europe.

Finally, these efforts are very much in tune with the parallel activity of Russia in its Asian summits, a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao and the July 5 summit of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Both summits featured open attacks on American policy and calls for multipolarity. Time will tell if Russia really has anything tangible to contribute to its partners’ needs or if they can deliver anything to Russia. Schroeder’s future prospects are clearly clouded, and France has proven incapable of unilaterally satisfying Moscow or, for that matter, its own agenda through the EU.

Rather than contribute to European stability, Russia still seeks to keep it from progressing further along the path of a consolidated status quo, particularly with regard to the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. As long as Moscow can refuse to make “a European choice” and do so with impunity and support from one or another major European capitals, genuine stability east of the Vistula will remain elusive. But it is not clear how Moscow, or more importantly, the Russian people, benefit from this protracted insecurity.

(St. Petersburg Times, July 3; Prime-Tass, July 5; Interfax, July 4; Itar-Tass, July 4; Moscow Times.com, July 6; CNSNEWS.com, July 5; RIA-Novosti, July 3, 4)