Russia, NATO, Drugs and Money

June 30, 2009
By:Roland Oliphant
For Russia Profile.org

There is no Golden Age of Cooperation to Go Back to, but NATO and Russia Seem to Have Found Some Basis for Understanding

Following the first meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in over a year, relations seem to be stabilizing. The sides appear to have agreed to disagree over Georgia, and spoke reassuringly about returning to a “spirit of cooperation.” But at the moment, this seems to mean little more than allowing NATO aircraft to overfly Russia on their way to Afghanistan.

It would be an understatement to say that relations between NATO and Russia have been strained in the recent past. Saturday’s informal meeting of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) was the first in over a year, and has been lauded as the end of the freeze brought on by the August war in Georgia. In the 11 odd months since the war, relations have hardly normalized.

Immediately after the war Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In February the Kyrgyz government shut down a U.S. airbase crucial to the war effort in Afghanistan, apparently at the behest of Moscow (an accusation both Russia and Kyrgyzstan denied). NATO in its turn insisted on going ahead with the long-planned exercises in Georgia earlier this summer, which the Kremlin denounced as “total provocation.” Russia this week started its own exercises on the Georgian border, which have received a similar reaction from the other side.

At the meeting in Corfu on Saturday both sides made it clear that they had not shifted on the Georgian question. Speaking at the post-summit press conference, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer reiterated NATO’s opposition to Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and commitment to Georgia’s territorial integrity. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov replied that “Russia’s position on Georgia is irreversible. Everyone should accept the new reality.”

Yet the sides seemed anxious to give an impression of “agreeing to disagree” on Georgia, while getting on with things elsewhere. The Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin, speaking by video-link to a press conference at RIA Novosti, said that “it had been decided to return relations to a spirit of cooperation.”

Rogozin credited the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with this vision, but the sentiment seems to have been echoed, with varying enthusiasm, on all sides. De hoop Scheffer, who is coming to the end of his term as NATO secretary-general, described the success of the meeting as a legacy he could be proud of. “It was my ambition to leave to my successor an NRC that is up and running. After the meeting which just ended, I have achieved that aim…there was clearly a sense in that meeting that the NRC, which had been in neutral ... is now back in gear.” Even the usually combative Lavrov, once he moved on from Georgia, said that Russia still wanted military relations with NATO. “We were prepared for hard talks, but we found our colleagues intelligent, calm and balanced,” said Rogozin.

The sides agreed to work together against drug trafficking, Somali piracy, terrorism and nuclear proliferation. But the flagship issue for the new cooperation is Afghanistan. Russia has apparently agreed to allow U.S. transport aircraft – up to 12 a day according to an unnamed Western diplomat quoted by the Kommersant daily – to cross Russian airspace on the way to Afghanistan. This will extend existing transit agreements with Germany, France and Spain, and complement the overland transport corridor that Russia opened for “non-lethal” supplies after the closure of the Manas airbase (the new agreement will open the overland route to military supplies as well). But given the fact of the closure of the Manas airbase in the first place, and the consequent dependence of the Afghan war effort on Russian goodwill, a more accurate account of this deal may be that this is something NATO needs and Russia is inclined – at the moment – to grant.

The problem with nostalgia of any sort is its tendency to eulogize something that never actually existed. And Berlusconi’s promotion of a “return to a spirit of cooperation” (as Rogozin described it) is sadly as grounded in reality as the social conservative longing for the imaginary 1950s when there was no divorce.

The spirit the delegates of the meeting would like to return to is best captured in the NATO-Russian Rome Declaration of 2002. Signed during the short-lived wave of trust following the September 11 attacks and NATO’s first moves in Afghanistan, the respective heads of state – Vladimir Putin on the Russian side, George W. Bush the most important on the NATO side – declared their conviction that “a qualitatively new relationship between NATO and the Russian Federation will constitute an essential contribution” to their aim of building “together a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principles of democracy and cooperative security and the principle that the security of all states in the Euro-Atlantic community is indivisible.”

But as Rogozin pointed out, that declaration was signed three years after NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999, a period marked by “tough relations and tough rhetoric between Moscow and Brussels.” And although Russia initially gave the United States and its allies access to Central Asia in order to prosecute their campaign, the honeymoon was short lived. Tensions over NATO expansion in Eastern Europe (especially after the “orange revolution” in Ukraine), Western recognition of Kosovo’s independence, American plans for a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and Russian withdrawal from the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty had both sides accusing the other of Cold War thinking long before the NRC and military cooperation was finally suspended after the war in Georgia in 2008.

The upbeat rhetoric of the NRC meeting seems to be part of the general air of anticipation surrounding the upcoming arrival of U.S. President Barack Obama in Moscow next week. But despite the change of administration in the United States, and the over-quoted sound bite about a “reset” of relations, it is by now clear that the differences between the two sides are what Russians like to call “objective.” That is, they are the result of clashes of interests, rather than clashes of personality.

It is telling that when Russian officials talk about cooperation in Afghanistan, they talk about interests “overlapping,” rather than converging. Neither side is likely to offer something for nothing, and the transit deal in particular is one where Russia can squeeze NATO.

Victor Ivanov, the head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Agency, suggested on the Friday before the meeting that the transit deal should be made conditional on NATO cutting the flow of heroin into Russia, the Moscow Times reported. And the Kommersant daily, again quoting one of its myriad of unnamed diplomatic sources, reported that the hundreds of containers sent across Russia to Afghanistan each month cost more than €3,000 each. Rather than returning to a spirit of cooperation that was actually an anomaly in a historically fractious relationship, Russia and NATO may find money a less romantic but sturdier basis for a relationship. Rather like a 1950s marriage.

It would be an understatement to say that relations between NATO and Russia have been strained in the recent past. Saturday’s informal meeting of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) was the first in over a year, and has been lauded as the end of the freeze brought on by the August war in Georgia. In the 11 odd months since the war, relations have hardly normalized.

Immediately after the war Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In February the Kyrgyz government shut down a U.S. airbase crucial to the war effort in Afghanistan, apparently at the behest of Moscow (an accusation both Russia and Kyrgyzstan denied). NATO in its turn insisted on going ahead with the long-planned exercises in Georgia earlier this summer, which the Kremlin denounced as “total provocation.” Russia this week started its own exercises on the Georgian border, which have received a similar reaction from the other side.

At the meeting in Corfu on Saturday both sides made it clear that they had not shifted on the Georgian question. Speaking at the post-summit press conference, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer reiterated NATO’s opposition to Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and commitment to Georgia’s territorial integrity. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov replied that “Russia’s position on Georgia is irreversible. Everyone should accept the new reality.”

Yet the sides seemed anxious to give an impression of “agreeing to disagree” on Georgia, while getting on with things elsewhere. The Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin, speaking by video-link to a press conference at RIA Novosti, said that “it had been decided to return relations to a spirit of cooperation.”

Rogozin credited the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with this vision, but the sentiment seems to have been echoed, with varying enthusiasm, on all sides. De hoop Scheffer, who is coming to the end of his term as NATO secretary-general, described the success of the meeting as a legacy he could be proud of. “It was my ambition to leave to my successor an NRC that is up and running. After the meeting which just ended, I have achieved that aim…there was clearly a sense in that meeting that the NRC, which had been in neutral ... is now back in gear.” Even the usually combative Lavrov, once he moved on from Georgia, said that Russia still wanted military relations with NATO. “We were prepared for hard talks, but we found our colleagues intelligent, calm and balanced,” said Rogozin.

The sides agreed to work together against drug trafficking, Somali piracy, terrorism and nuclear proliferation. But the flagship issue for the new cooperation is Afghanistan. Russia has apparently agreed to allow U.S. transport aircraft – up to 12 a day according to an unnamed Western diplomat quoted by the Kommersant daily – to cross Russian airspace on the way to Afghanistan. This will extend existing transit agreements with Germany, France and Spain, and complement the overland transport corridor that Russia opened for “non-lethal” supplies after the closure of the Manas airbase (the new agreement will open the overland route to military supplies as well). But given the fact of the closure of the Manas airbase in the first place, and the consequent dependence of the Afghan war effort on Russian goodwill, a more accurate account of this deal may be that this is something NATO needs and Russia is inclined – at the moment – to grant.

The problem with nostalgia of any sort is its tendency to eulogize something that never actually existed. And Berlusconi’s promotion of a “return to a spirit of cooperation” (as Rogozin described it) is sadly as grounded in reality as the social conservative longing for the imaginary 1950s when there was no divorce.

The spirit the delegates of the meeting would like to return to is best captured in the NATO-Russian Rome Declaration of 2002. Signed during the short-lived wave of trust following the September 11 attacks and NATO’s first moves in Afghanistan, the respective heads of state – Vladimir Putin on the Russian side, George W. Bush the most important on the NATO side – declared their conviction that “a qualitatively new relationship between NATO and the Russian Federation will constitute an essential contribution” to their aim of building “together a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principles of democracy and cooperative security and the principle that the security of all states in the Euro-Atlantic community is indivisible.”

But as Rogozin pointed out, that declaration was signed three years after NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999, a period marked by “tough relations and tough rhetoric between Moscow and Brussels.” And although Russia initially gave the United States and its allies access to Central Asia in order to prosecute their campaign, the honeymoon was short lived. Tensions over NATO expansion in Eastern Europe (especially after the “orange revolution” in Ukraine), Western recognition of Kosovo’s independence, American plans for a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and Russian withdrawal from the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty had both sides accusing the other of Cold War thinking long before the NRC and military cooperation was finally suspended after the war in Georgia in 2008.

The upbeat rhetoric of the NRC meeting seems to be part of the general air of anticipation surrounding the upcoming arrival of U.S. President Barack Obama in Moscow next week. But despite the change of administration in the United States, and the over-quoted sound bite about a “reset” of relations, it is by now clear that the differences between the two sides are what Russians like to call “objective.” That is, they are the result of clashes of interests, rather than clashes of personality.

It is telling that when Russian officials talk about cooperation in Afghanistan, they talk about interests “overlapping,” rather than converging. Neither side is likely to offer something for nothing, and the transit deal in particular is one where Russia can squeeze NATO.

Victor Ivanov, the head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Agency, suggested on the Friday before the meeting that the transit deal should be made conditional on NATO cutting the flow of heroin into Russia, the Moscow Times reported. And the Kommersant daily, again quoting one of its myriad of unnamed diplomatic sources, reported that the hundreds of containers sent across Russia to Afghanistan each month cost more than €3,000 each. Rather than returning to a spirit of cooperation that was actually an anomaly in a historically fractious relationship, Russia and NATO may find money a less romantic but sturdier basis for a relationship. Rather like a 1950s marriage.

Source: Russia Profile.org