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EU and Russia: business as usual
Viewpoint
Tuesday November 11th 2008
The Balkan states are furious; they feel Nato and the EU have abandoned them to the superpower games of Russia, says Guardian foreign affairs editor Simon Tisdall
Tuesday November 11th 2008
Game of chicken... Medvedev and Putin. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Poland is seething. Lithuania and the other Baltic states are anxious. Georgia and Ukraine fret they have been left out in the cold. And Britain is privately feeling a little foolish. But none of that is likely to alter EU plans to resume talks on a partnership pact with Russia as soon as possible.
The talks were broken off last summer after Moscow responded to fighting between Georgia and South Ossetian separatists by launching a full-scale invasion of the former Soviet republic. European leaders were split over what action to take. In the end, postponing the dialogue was the only move they could all agree to.
If that sounds pretty feeble, it is. But now, less than three months after the fighting in Georgia came to any uneasy halt, the EU has decided to drop even that minor sanction. It wants to return to business as usual. It is almost as though the conflict never happened.
Without so much as a blush, Europe is putting its political, commercial and energy interests before its responsibilities to collective security.
Poland and the Baltic states are rightly furious. Pressure on them from Russia comes in various forms, whether it is agitation about the rights of ethnic Russian minorities, trade restrictions, "cyber warfare", or implicit threats to cut oil and gas supplies.
They believe, broadly speaking, that Russia’s new nationalists are intent on extending their influence beyond the country’s borders, carving out spheres of influence just like in Soviet times.
They joined the EU and Nato precisely to stop this sort of thing happening. Now they fear they are being let down.
Georgia and Ukraine are in an even worse situation. Their prospects of joining the EU receded further last week when the EU commission issued its latest report on enlargement. A host of countries in the Balkans, plus Turkey, were all told that their membership will be a long time coming. And they are much higher up the queue than either Georgia or Ukraine.
When it comes to their hopes of joining Nato, the two countries face a de facto veto from Moscow. Of course, Russia does not actually have a veto. But with Germany, France and Italy, to name three, all worried that they could be drawn into armed conflict against Russia in the Caucasus, there’s no way they are going to let the Ukrainians and Georgians in. Far too risky.
That leaves both countries vulnerable to further Russian bullying. Experts say that the unresolved Georgian conflict could flare up again at any time, given that increased numbers of Russian troops continue to occupy forward positions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia – the breakaway Georgian regions.
In Ukraine, concern centres on the ethnic Russian population of the Crimea and the Sevastopol base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet – a holdover from the cold war. Some fear a campaign of destabilisation orchestrated by "friends in the north".
Britain has again demonstrated its own impotence. It has reason to feel foolish: of all the bigger EU states, it reacted most forcibly towards Russian actions in Georgia. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, went to Kiev and told Moscow, in effect, that its aggression would not stand.
Well, guess what, it’s still standing. And while Miliband turns his attention to another crisis he cannot solve – Congo – the Kremlin is busy playing a whole new game of chicken, this time with the new US president-elect.
Basically Russia is trying to see if it can scare or charm Barack Obama into scrapping the Bush administration’s plans to deploy interceptor missiles in Poland as part of a defensive missile shield. Bush says that the defences are needed to protect from missile attacks from rogue states such as Iran. Russia says that they are an attempt to undermine its nuclear deterrent.
Missile defence bases in eastern Europe were always a bad idea – and in this case Russian suspicions are understandable. Iran doesn’t have the hardware to threaten Europe, even if it wanted to, which it does not. The threat to the US is imaginary. Obama would do well to put the whole daft project on hold.
But the way the kings of the Kremlin are trying to threaten and browbeat smaller European neighbours, especially by moving ballistic missiles into Kaliningrad, is enough to make one want to poke them in the eye, even if the impulse is not entirely rational.
Russia’s leaders, principally the prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin, just don’t get it. They still want to play superpower games. They’re still fighting the cold war. They secretly suspect they have become outdated – and irrelevant. And the thought drives them crazy.
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