Showing posts with label New Cold War. Show all posts

Friday, January 23, 2009

Friday, November 07, 2008

Banki skuteczniejsze niż tanki

Wojciech Lorenz 14-10-2008, ostatnia aktualizacja 14-10-2008 04:21
Do jakiejś formy politycznego anszlusu Białorusi dojdzie w pierwszej połowie przyszłego roku. Kolejne cele Moskwy to Krym i być może kraje bałtyckie – przewiduje autor książki „Nowa zimna wojna” w rozmowie z Wojciechem Lorenzem

źródło: Rzeczpospolita
Edward Lucas; Nowa zimna wojna. Jak Kreml zagraża Rosji i Zachodowi; Rebis, 2008
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Rz: Kiedy zaczęła się nowa zimna wojna?

Edward Lucas: Historycy będą się długo o to spierać i zapowiada się fascynująca dyskusja. Niektórzy twierdzą, że zimna wojna się w ogóle nie skończyła. Moim zdaniem zaczęła się, kiedy Władimir Putin został prezydentem, a już kiedy był premierem pod koniec ery Borysa Jelcyna widać było, że władza wraca w ręce ludzi związanych z KGB. Zaczęła się od ostrej retoryki wobec Gruzji, aż wreszcie doszło do ataku na nią.

Niektórzy zachodni przywódcy uważają, że prezydent Gruzji sam się o to prosił, a Rosja jest niewinna.

To nie Gruzja zaatakowała Rosję, tylko Rosja Gruzję. Rosjanie długo przygotowywali prowokację, a prezydent Micheil Saakaszwili dał się wciągnąć w pułapkę, wydając rozkaz ataku na separatystów w Osetii Południowej. Rosja tylko na to czekała i natychmiast przypuściła potężne kontruderzenie, pustosząc, grabiąc i mordując mieszkańców Gruzji. Wiele zachodnich państw nie dostrzega, w jakim kierunku ewoluuje Rosja. Pokazał to szczyt NATO w Bukareszcie, gdzie sojusz nie zgodził się na przyznanie Gruzji i Ukrainie planu działań na rzecz członkostwa. Rosja zobaczyła, że podzielona jest nie tylko Unia Europejska, ale też NATO i potraktowała to jak zielone światło do działania.

Kto będzie następnym celem Kremla?

Najłatwiej byłoby z Białorusią, bo za nią nikt się nie wstawi. Bronienie Białorusi wyglądałoby na Zachodzie głupio, skoro przez tyle lat się mówiło, że rządzi nią dyktator. Założę się, że do jakiejś formy politycznego anszlusu Białorusi dojdzie w pierwszej połowie przyszłego roku. Kolejne cele to Krym i być może kraje bałtyckie. Dzięki licznej rosyjskiej mniejszości są łatwym obiektem prowokacji. Rosja powie np., że jej obywatele są prześladowani i zacznie popierać tworzenie milicji obywatelskiej. Naturalnie władze będą próbowały je rozbroić, a wtedy Rosja wystąpi w obronie mieszkańców z rosyjskimi paszportami.

Pisze pan, że dotąd NATO nie miało dokładnych planów obrony nowych członków przed atakiem Rosji.

Plany były dość ogólnikowe i dotyczyły raczej eskalacji konfliktu politycznego niż militarnego. Nikt nie zakładał, że może dojść do wojny z Rosją, która była traktowana jako partner.

Francja daje do zrozumienia, że nie jest gotowa umierać za Gruzję, więc lepiej jej nie przyjmować do NATO. Myśli pan, że sojusz byłby gotów użyć siły w obronie krajów bałtyckich lub Polski?

Lepiej nie podważać gwarancji związanych z artykułem piątym poprzez podawanie go w wątpliwość. To błąd, który robią politycy niektórych nowych krajów członkowskich. Polska zamiast zabiegać o bazy NATO, powinna powtarzać, że każda jej jednostka wojskowa to jednostka NATO. Nie wiemy, czy Ameryka byłaby gotowa zaryzykować trzecią wojnę światową nie tylko w obronie Tallina czy Rygi, ale także Warszawy czy Londynu. Ale Amerykanie konsekwentnie podkreślają, że artykuł piąty daje pełne gwarancje, a poza tym sporo teraz robią, aby te gwarancje wzmocnić. Niepokoi mnie natomiast niedawny sondaż w „Financial Times”, z którego wynika, że Niemcy nie poparliby użycia siły w obronie państw bałtyckich. Jestem pewien, że Brytyjczycy nie mieliby takich wątpliwości z prostego powodu: często jeżdżą do krajów bałtyckich i interesują się ich historią. To pokazuje, że w ramach sojuszu można podejmować tzw. miękkie działania, które spowodują, że będziemy się czuli ze sobą związani i za siebie odpowiedzialni. Polska też ma w tej sprawie sporo do zrobienia.

Czy grozi nam odbudowanie systemu totalitarnego w Rosji?

W Rosji nikt nie próbuje wskrzeszać komunizmu, bo jako system się on skompromitował. Ale stworzono nowy system, tzw. kapitalizm kolesi, w którym powiązania i znajomości są ważniejsze od konkurencji, a Kreml sprawuje kontrolę nad gospodarką. Putin i Miedwiediew wiedzą, że wykorzystując gospodarkę, mogą lepiej umacniać wpływy, niż robiąc to środkami militarnymi.

Rosja nieprzypadkowo zaoferowała właśnie gigantyczną pożyczkę Islandii, która zbankrutowała. Islandia ma ogromne geostrategiczne znaczenie. Banki są skuteczniejsze niż tanki. Aby odwrócić uwagę obywateli od tego, w jak niedemokratycznym kraju żyją, władze próbują im pokazać, jak wielkie osiągnięcia Rosja ma na arenie międzynarodowej.

Czy musimy się pogodzić z tym, że Rosja będzie się umacniać w opozycji do Zachodu?

Nie wyobrażam sobie, aby Rosja w długiej perspektywie mogła być sojusznikiem Chin czy świata muzułmańskiego. Rosja bardziej niż Japonia należy do świata zachodniego. Ale na razie swój system rządzenia oparła na strachu. Przeciwników politycznych wsadza się do psychuszek, od czasu do czasu przeprowadza się pojedyncze zabójstwa polityczne. To wystarczy, aby zastraszyć media i biznesmenów.

Ostatnie działania spowodowały, że zastraszeni są też sąsiedzi Rosji. Zachód musi się temu przeciwstawić. Musi ograniczyć napływ rosyjskiego kapitału, który przecież nie powstał w warunkach normalnej konkurencji, na swój teren. To byłby pierwszy krok do demontażu tego systemu. Na razie mamy na Zachodzie do czynienia z mechanizmem, który nazywam schroederyzacją. Wielu zachodnich przywódców i biznesmenów uważa, że zyski ze współpracy są zbyt duże, aby można było ją ograniczać.

Edward Lucas; Nowa zimna wojna. Jak Kreml zagraża Rosji i Zachodowi; Rebis, 2008

Edward Lucas jest publicystą „The Economist”. Był korespondentem miesięcznika w Europie Środkowej i Wschodniej. Dziś nakładem wydawnictwa Rebis ukazuje się jego książka „Nowa zimna wojna. Jak Kreml zagraża Rosji i Zachodowi”

Thursday, October 09, 2008

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FT op-ed piece

Do not let Russia ‘Finlandise’ western Europe

By Edward Lucas

Published: October 8 2008 19:32 | Last updated: October 8 2008 19:32

When I first published The New Cold War last February, many contested my title. But what once seemed eccentric now looks mainstream. Relations between the west and Russia have entered a period of extraordinary mistrust and mutual disdain. Indeed, after the conflict in Georgia, the description “cold war” risks looking like an understatement. Russia has shown that it is prepared to use military force against another country; the west has shown that it will not fight and will merely respond with a token protest. Some in the European Union, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, may see the Kremlin-dictated truce that stopped the fighting (though not the ethnic cleansing, which continues apace) as a triumph. From Russia’s point of view, the lesson of the Georgian adventure is simple: we got away with it.

News last week that a Russian nuclear bomber simulated an attack on a city in northern England, combined with the biggest military manoeuvres since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the dispatch of a Russian naval squadron to the Caribbean, raise two pressing questions: what is Russia up to and what should we do in response?

The easy but mistaken answer to the first question is that Russia is simply flexing its muscles in response to the west’s misguided meddling, such as its decision to expand Nato and set up a missile defence scheme in Russia’s backyard. Unlike in the 1990s, we now have to respect, and accept, Russia’s interests. A shopping list based on that thinking might include: sacrifice Georgia, cancel Nato expansion (or better still, dissolve the alliance), scrap missile defence, arm-twist the Baltic states and Ukraine into giving their Russian population special status, allow Russia to buy anything it wants in western Europe – and all will be well.

But supposing Russia’s aim is the re-creation of a “lite” version of the Soviet empire, based not on military might but on economic dominance and pipeline monopolies; and that it wants the “Finlandisation” of western Europe. That involves the use of money, above and below board, to cultivate friendly lobbies. One example is this week’s dramatic €4bn ($5.5bn, £3bn) Kremlin bail-out of Iceland. Another is the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder chairing a Russian-German gas pipeline consortium. The “Schröderisation” of Europe is matched by divide-and-rule tactics. The result: most big countries of “old Europe” care more about ties with Russia than about their supposed allies in eastern Europe.

Attempts to isolate Russia in response would be wrong: keeping communication with the regime may help slow its paranoia and adventurism. It also sends a signal to the burgeoning Russian business class. The financial crisis has prompted some powerful figures such as Alexander Lebedev, the ex-KGB financier, to criticise openly the Kremlin’s bellicose rhetoric and repressive internal policies.

But we can also make it harder for Russia to do the things that endanger us. The overwhelming need is to rethink energy policy. At the moment, the push inside the EU is for greater liberalisation. That would be fine, if we were not dealing with highly politicised monopolists as our energy suppliers. If the European Commission can bring Microsoft to heel over its outrageous behaviour with Windows software, it can do the same with Gazprom: not just as a tool of Kremlin foreign policy, but also as a flagrant price-fixer and competition inhibitor (for example in its refusal to allow third-party access to its pipelines). Any EU company that operated like Gazprom would find itself in the dock within days.

Even more important is restricting the flow of dirty money (not only from Russia) into our banks and markets. Instead of being bean-counters without a conscience, accountants must be guardians of financial probity, with a demanding test for clients whose business model is based on rent-seeking and cronyism. Some of the energy trading companies with close Kremlin ties based in Europe are little more than conspiracies to loot from the Russian taxpayer, gaining oil and gas cheaply and selling it dearly.

The same goes for bankers. If they conceal the beneficial ownership of these phoney companies they are an accomplice to theft. Perhaps one of the benefits of the credit crunch will be a more sceptical response to financiers who maintain that their critics are Luddites. The west has done well to impede the crudest kind of money-laundering. It is no longer possible to turn up at an Austrian bank with a suitcase full of cash, open an account, and make some transfers. We should apply the same principle to asset-laundering: using western capital markets to sell shares and bonds in phoney companies.

These measures will not stop the regime in its tracks. But they will show its backers that their geopolitical ambitions come at a cost: provoke us enough and it will be bad for business. That lesson has not yet got through.

We need to hurry. It will not be too long before financial centres such as Dubai, Shanghai and Mumbai are competing so effectively with London that clients that we find too dodgy will go elsewhere. What our financial centres sell, above all, is respectability. We have priced it too cheaply in the past few years. It is time to be choosier, while we still have some left in stock.

The writer is author of ‘The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West’. A new edition is published next week

Saturday, August 30, 2008

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Daily Telegraph: Putin's pipeline to power

Russia is fighting a new Cold War with banks and pipelines, not tanks and warplanes

By Edward Lucas

In classical mythology, Georgia was the land where the Argonauts had to harness bulls with bronze hooves to win the Golden Fleece. Modern Georgia is the source of a treasure scarcely less precious: oil and gas from central Asia and the Caspian, piped along the only east-west energy corridor that Russia does not control. But whereas Jason and his comrades triumphed, our quest has ended in humiliating failure.

As the occupying power in Georgia, Russia can close or destroy those pipelines whenever it wishes. The only country in the region that even came close to sharing Western values, one vital for our energy security, has been humiliatingly defeated and dismembered.

As politicians and voters in the free world return from their holidays, two big questions require answering. What happens next? And how do we stop it?

Decoding the Kremlin’s precise intentions is as tricky now as it was in the days of Kremlinology – a discipline as archaic as Morse code. But the outlines are clear.

Russia wants to recreate a “lite” version of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and to neutralise the rest of the continent. Unlike the old Cold War, military action is a last resort: for the most part, it is banks and pipelines, not tanks and warplanes, that are doing the dirty work.

This may sound strange, given what has happened in Georgia. But it is vital to realise that this was not the beginning of a new Russian push, but part of something that began in the mid-1990s.

Russia has nobbled Belarus – the only other country, apart from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, that is ready to recognise the new statelets of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It props up the narco-state of Tajikistan, cossets the dictatorship in Uzbekistan and woos the benighted despots of Turkmenistan. It has a cautious alliance with China, in the form of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, an outfit dedicated to fighting “extremism, terrorism and separatism” (although this last “-ism” has evidently been forgotten when it comes to Georgia).

It has stitched up energy deals in North Africa; it flirts with Iran and sells weapons to Hugo Chavez, the America-hating windbag who runs Venezuela. And by using energy diplomacy and divide-and-rule tactics, it is stitching up Europe country by country, from Cyprus to the Netherlands.

And it works. Over the crisis in Georgia, Europe has shown astonishing softness. The leaders of the EU have been all but invisible.

Where is the supposed foreign-policy chief, Javier Solana? Or the foreign-affairs commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner? Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has been humiliated by the blatant Russian breaches of the ceasefire agreement that he negotiated. Europe’s weakness is the result of multiple forms of soft-headedness and short-sightedness.

Partly it is simple anti-Americanism: if Vladimir Putin is making life difficult for George Bush, he must be a good guy. That attitude lies behind the astonishing opinion polls in countries such as Germany, which show that people have more trust in xenophobic, authoritarian Russia than they do in the world’s most powerful democracy.

There is also a mistaken belief that Russia is an ally in the struggle against globalisation: here is a country, argue intellectuals such as the British historian Correlli Barnett, that does not let itself be pushed around by multinational companies and the meddling do-gooders of the self-appointed “international community”.

But this is to misunderstand Russia under its kleptocratic and chauvinist ex-KGB rulers. Russia likes multilateral organisations, so long as it dominates them. It runs a whole bunch: for example, the “Commonwealth of Independent States”, which it is using to legitimise its occupation of Georgia.

Russia is also advocating a new pan-European security organisation, with formal legal status. This, it hopes, will exclude the United States, and tie up the West in the knots of international law, so that military intervention of the kind seen in the former Yugoslavia becomes all but impossible.

Similarly, although the Kremlin makes life difficult domestically for Western oil companies and tightly restricts foreign investment in any industry that it dubs “strategic” (which potentially covers almost anything), it is another story abroad. Russia delights in the possibilities of the global economy. If regulators in New York are sniffy about listing stolen companies on the stock exchange, there is always London. And if you fail even London’s undemanding test, Dubai, Bombay and Shanghai await with open arms.

Russia also uses its colossal war chest, fuelled by oil and gas revenues, to buy up assets in other countries. And that is the taproot of European softness: money.

In the Cold War, doing business with the Soviet Union was a rare and suspicious activity. Now Russia has penetrated our markets and businesses to a huge degree. Energy companies such as Austria’s OMV, Germany’s E.ON and Italy’s ENI work hand-in-glove with outfits such as Gazprom, which is nominally Russia’s biggest company, but better described as the gas division of Kremlin, Inc.

This directly affects politics. Germany, with Russia, is building the Nord Stream gas pipeline along the Baltic seabed to bypass Poland. Russia has already cut off energy supplies to punish Lithuania, the Czech Republic and other countries. When Nord Stream is built, it will be able to do the same to Poland.
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Yet even now, after a clear and brutal demonstration of Russian imperialism, Germany refuses to consider cancelling the pipeline. Angela Merkel was willing to pay a high-profile visit to the Baltic states – a likely target for Russia’s next push westwards – to offer support. But she would not even contemplate ending her energy alliance with Russia.

And it is hard to see this changing: European consumers will not pay hugely higher energy prices to finance alternative supplies, nor will politicians give the EU the weight it needs to bargain properly with Russia (a country, don’t forget, that is three times smaller in population than the EU, with an economy roughly a tenth of the size).

With the EU and Nato hopelessly divided, Russia can dismiss our toothless whimpers about Georgia. That leaves Eastern Europe to base its security on the United States.

Yet even America’s willingness to confront Russia is limited. Every incoming president since Bill Clinton has criticised his predecessor for being soft on Russia. But none has proved any better. For all John McCain’s fighting talk, and Barack Obama’s belated belligerence, neither man will be able to take a hard line. America needs Russia – for nuclear security, to hold back Iran, to contain North Korea, as a supply route to Afghanistan, in hunting down terrorists. And Russia knows it. If the mood in Washington is frosty, the Kremlin need only flirt more intensively with Iran, Venezuela and China, or withhold co-operation on some pressing topic, and America will buckle.

On top of all that, Russia’s leaders have a massively secure position at home. Their central bank has nearly $600 billion in hard-currency reserves, while their popularity is far greater than the Politburo ever dreamed of. Mr Putin, and the war in Georgia, are acclaimed – a view stoked by the docile media, which portrayed the conflict as a valiant crusade against genocide and Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili as a murderous fascist.

Abroad, Russia senses that power in the world is shifting east and south, to countries such as India and China, which see Georgia very differently. They may not much like separatism, but they also think that the West is practising double standards: America would not tolerate the Kremlin’s meddling in its backyard, so why should Russia have to put up with an America protégé in the Caucasus?

The German philosopher GF Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva spreads her wings only at dusk: we perceive historical changes only when they are almost complete. We have enjoyed an extraordinary 20-year period in which Russia was weak and seemingly benign. Europe became (mostly) whole and free.

The idea that the continent could again become a battleground between East and West is unwelcome, and to many still inconceivable. But it is happening: and our resurgent enemy seemingly holds most of the cards.

There is, however, one chink of light, for us if not for the Russians. In the long term, the Putin regime means catastrophe for his country. The political system is opaque and fossilised, unable to respond to the needs of a changing economy or to rein in corruption, let alone deal with the fast-growing Muslim population, which has soared to 25 million – a 40 per cent rise since 1989 – as the birthrate among the Slavs has plunged. Modernisation of public services and infrastructure, in a country awash with money, has been dismally slow.

Foreign adventures are the traditional way for autocratic rulers to distract public opinion from problems at home, and Russia is no exception. The regime running Russia will come unstuck in the end. But the cost in the meantime will be dreadful.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

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BBC interview

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Daily Mail

[I am back from my holidays. And though I am much refreshed, I am both gloomy and furious. The piece that follows is just an opening salvo]

Like any bully, Russia can be faced down. Let's do it sooner rather than later

By Edward Lucas 28th August 2008

David Miliband is hardly the kind of man to set the hard nuts of the old KGB trembling.

The ruthless ex-spooks and spivs who run Russia believe that nothing can now stop their restoration of the old Soviet empire.

And the tragic, even terrifying truth is that they could well be right. Indeed, we are close to losing the new cold war before our politicians even admit that it has started.

By staging their brutal and audacious attack on Georgia at a time when most Western leaders were either on holiday or at the Olympic Games, Russia caught us napping.

And even when we did belatedly respond, we said nothing to bother them.

The message from the Kremlin comes cold and clear: if Russia is expelled from Western clubs, no matter.

With a massive U.S.$600billion in the bank, and politics firmly stitched up at home, Russia is ready to roll - and roll westwards.

In short, post-Soviet politics is now a triumph of mind over matter - they don't mind and we don't matter.

The past weeks have seen a stunning series of defeats for Britain and its allies. It is not just that Georgia, the only country in the vital Caucasus region that believes in our values, has been dismembered and humiliated. The map of Europe has been redrawn, and in darker colours.

Putinism - a mixture of Soviet nostalgia and nationalism - is now wildly popular in Russia. Hopes that the heady mix of liberty and justice that once toppled the Iron Curtain would take widespread root in the former Soviet empire have been dashed.

Worse, at any moment, on any pretext, Russia's so-called peace-keepers (cynics call them piece-keepers) can seize or destroy the vital oil and gas pipelines crossing Georgia.

These are our only escape from the Kremlin's stranglehold on energy supplies from the east.

Had it met a really tough response from the West, the Kremlin might possibly have pulled back in Georgia. Now it is pressing ahead. The next target is Ukraine, by far the biggest and most important of the ex-Soviet republics.

Ukraine is a free country with a lively media where nobody lives in fear of the midnight knock on the door, forcible incarceration in psychiatric hospitals or the arbitrary confiscation of property. Such things are the hallmarks of the ex-KGB regime in Russia.

But that does not mean Ukraine can defend itself. It is divided on ethnic lines, with a heavily Russified east that sees plenty to admire in Russia's resurgence, and finds the Western orientation of the country's quarrelsome and incompetent leadership mystifying and unappealing.

The most explosive mix is in Crimea, the balmy Black Sea peninsula, where Britain fought its last full-scale war with Russia.

Stalin deported Crimea's indigenous population of Tatars in 1944. They were replaced with settlers, who proudly hold Russian passports and detest their nominal Ukrainian rulers.

As it did in South Ossetia, Russia can all too easily say that it needs to intervene to protect their interests.

One of Russia's biggest naval bases, Sevastopol, is in Crimea. Ukraine wants Russia to pull out as agreed when the lease expires in 2017.

Russia shows no sign of wanting to leave a naval citadel that holds a place in Russian hearts, similar to that of Plymouth or Portsmouth in ours.

It is precisely this nationalist sentiment that the Kremlin has found so easy to manipulate. Russians feel they were badly treated by the West in the 1990s.

The billions we squandered in vain attempts to prop up the ramshackle Russian economy have long been forgotten. So, too, have our attempts to befriend them.

Russians complain bitterly that Nato expanded eastwards. But thank goodness it did. Georgia's fate is a warning of what happens to those countries that failed to get in.

It is in the Baltic that this geopolitical drama will reach its crux. Unlike Georgia and Ukraine, the Baltic states are unquestioned successes. The story of their recovery after a ruinous 50-year foreign occupation is inspirational.

Twenty years ago, I watched these three small, proud countries leap to freedom as the Soviet Union collapsed. Now I fear dreadfully that their independence will prove shortlived.

I fear for Estonia and Latvia, which have tens of thousands of Russian passport holders - a legacy of the cynical migration policies pursued by the Soviet Union.

Russia has been complaining for years about the language and citizenship policies of these two states, which it regards, preposterously, as racist.

In truth, the restrictions are mild - especially given that these countries have just emerged from decades of forced Russification.
stalin

Soviet shadow: The Georgian flag flies at half mast in downtown Gori, behind a statue of Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin

Public business must be conducted in the local language: those wanting to become citizens must learn it, and pass a simple history exam.

But the Russian propaganda machine is all too capable of whipping up an artificial scandal.

Lithuania, meanwhile, has only a small Russian minority but is vulnerable for a different reason: voters are exhausted and disillusioned with what they see as a corrupt and incompetent government.

The great danger is that they turn to populist pro-Russian politicians in elections in October.

But our politicians are no better. Blinkered, browbeaten, bribed or brainwashed - they seem, pitifully, ill-fitted to the challenge now facing them.

The callow and ignorant administration of George Bush has ripped up nuclear arms agreements with Russia, the world's second-largest nuclear power, without providing any alternative.

It failed to hold back the impetuous, adventurist Georgian leadership. But it is ridiculous to blame America. Europe's security is our business.

Let us not forget our own guilty men: Tony Blair snuggling up to Vladimir Putin for nights at the opera in St Petersburg, safely distant from the howls echoing from the torture chambers of Chechnya.

Nor our pinstriped fifth column: businessmen whose salivating pursuit of profits blinded them to the looming menace of Russia's authoritarian crony capitalism.

And let us also blame the European leaders in Germany, Italy, France and elsewhere, crass and craven by turns, who have divided the continent and endangered our security.

But we can still fight back. We should scrutinise the way in which Kremlin cronies use our banks to launder the billions they have stolen from the long-suffering people of Russia.
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We can tighten our visa rules so that Ukrainians find a warmer welcome, and Russians a colder one.

We should remember that when we act together, we are far richer and more powerful than ill-governed Russia.

Europe's population is three times bigger, its economy ten times larger than that of its new foe.

We can protect what is left of Georgia by spending money to rebuild what the Russian forces and their freebooters have looted and destroyed.

And, most vitally, we can send Nato warships and soldiers to emphasise our support for the Baltic states, our loyal little allies now shivering on the front line.

Because for all the swinish swagger of the ex-KGB men as they toast their destruction of a country one-thirtieth their size, they have no appetite for a real confrontation.

Like any bully, Russia can be faced down. So let us do it sooner rather than later.

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RFE/RL interview

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

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Heavyweight review

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

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Google Authors

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New Cold War reviewed in Time Magazine

Wednesday, May. 07, 2008

Chill Out: The New Cold War

By Peter Savodnik

For the past few years, most every sentient being west of Smolensk has been aware that something very bad is happening in Russia. They don't elect their governors anymore. There are no major television stations that are free from Kremlin influence. The Duma always seems to do what the President wants. Edward Lucas, the Central and East European correspondent for the Economist, is here to tell us that, in fact, things are much, much worse than that. In The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West, Lucas makes a powerful case that Russia hasn't simply lost its way or stumbled on the path to modernity; it has reignited the same intercontinental struggle Americans thought they'd long won.

The New Cold War is intelligent, thoughtful and overflowing with footnote-laden accounts of all the terrible things Vladimir Putin and his lieutenants have been doing since the former KGB agent took power on New Year's Eve, 1999.

While many of the details are known, Lucas offers the first comprehensive compendium of the Kremlin's major (and not so major) crimes against Russians and non-Russians alike. There's the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the dismemberment of his Yukos oil empire. There's the 2007 alleged cyberwar Russia launched against Estonia in the wake of a flap surrounding a Soviet war memorial.

Lucas details a 1984-style "History According to the Kremlin" now being taught in classrooms, according to which Josef Stalin, the greatest mass murderer in history, was a patriot who did what had to be done to defeat fascism. And he also examines the Kremlin's repeated use of its ample energy resources to threaten its Western-oriented neighbors. Most troubling is what Lucas calls "pipeline politics" — Moscow's plans to build the Nord Stream gas pipeline from the Shtokman Field in the Barents Sea to the German city of Greifswald; and its attempts to derail Western plans to install a pipeline connecting the Caspian Sea and Baumgarten, Austria. That project, the Nabucco pipeline, would circumvent Russia by bisecting Turkey, and would give Russia's neighbors far more bargaining power when negotiating with Gazprom, the state-run gas company.

All these sundry violations — of any democratic sensibility or common sense — are not simply side effects of a resurgent Russian authoritarianism. They're indicators, Lucas argues, of a more threatening development: the re-emergence of the battle for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Baltics — the whole former Soviet space. While Europe sleeps, he suggests, Moscow's secret police are infiltrating foreign governments, establishing a transcontinental energy monopoly and exploiting divisions between Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Tallinn. Exacerbating all of the above is the fact that no one is doing much to counter this angry, revanchist Russia.

"The West is losing the New Cold War," Lucas writes, "while having barely noticed that it has started. Mr. Putin and his Kremlin allies have seized power in Russia, cast a dark shadow over the eastern half of the continent, and established formidable bridgeheads in the main Western countries. And the willingness to resist looks alarmingly feeble."

This is all troubling stuff, and Lucas has done an excellent reporting job. And therein lies the problem. This is a reporting job, not history, and a certain perspective is missing. It lacks the cultural-historical context that a book on a struggle pitting Russia against the West demands. A book about a new cold war is really a book about a new geopolitics. Alas, The New Cold War doesn't read like a book about anything so monumental or metaphysical as a cold war. Instead, it comes across as a series of news stories on an unfortunate turn of events in the former Soviet Union.

It's premature to call the still-unfolding rivalry a cold war. No doubt, Russia and the West have divergent interests. According to the Russian worldview, everything good that happens in the West is bad for Russia. Worse yet, Moscow seems willing to do almost anything to achieve great-power (if not superpower) status.

Still, we're far from a Manichaean showdown. Russia is too weak to wage a cold war. Outside Moscow, St. Petersburg and a handful of other cities, most Russians live in Khrushchev- and Brezhnev-era hovels. The economy is diversifying but not diversified; for now, the oil and gas markets largely decide how much money flows into the Kremlin coffers. And the military is a wreck; Lucas points out, for instance, that the navy now has just 20 seaworthy surface ships.

Most importantly, Russia lacks a clear political identity. Beyond its economic and strategic concerns, Russia doesn't know what it wants to be. This is an ideological, even ontological lassitude. The reason the postcommunist world is so unstable is not that Russia is on the verge of repatriating old turf. It's that Russia is navigating between two ideas of Russia: its former Soviet self and its current shadow of that former self — a cartoonish, hopelessly upside-down mythology versus a dispiriting reality. Russia will not transcend this dichotomy until it begins building a truly original future instead of trying to cobble together a distant past.

Lucas is right that the West should set aside its differences and resist Russian aggression. But we should be clear about the nature of this aggression. The new cold war, thankfully, has yet to break out.

Friday, May 09, 2008

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BBC interviews today

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

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Reviews in German

Sunday, April 27, 2008

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Speeches

Monday, March 24, 2008

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Maclean's interview

Interview with Edward Lucas

'It's as shocking to have a former KGB official running Russia as it would be to have a former SS colonel running Germany'

CHARLIE GILLIS | March 12, 2008 |

Edward Lucas has spent the past 20 years working as a journalist in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, covering the heady days at the end of the Cold War. Then came the rise of President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin's crackdown on dissent — developments that transformed the British reporter from a detached observer into a passionate advocate for a hardline stand against Moscow. His new book, The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West, outlines his fears about the country's authoritarian drift and its impact on the world beyond. Now eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist magazine, Lucas spoke to Maclean's about Russia's new-found assertiveness, and why the complacent West must take notice.

Q: Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian reporter who was assassinated, was a friend of yours. Her name and address had appeared on an online "death list" shortly before the killing. Another of your journalist friends who had been critical of the Kremlin appeared on a similar list and now lives in fear. Is it fair to say the story of post-Soviet Russia has gotten personal for you?

A: It is personal in many ways. One is that I grew up with the Cold War very present in my life. I remember my father [an Oxford academic] risking his freedom by smuggling the works of Greek philosophers into Prague, giving them to people willing to risk their freedoms to discuss them. That left quite an impression. I was also there for the collapse of Communism, and it was a great few years of my life. A lot of my friends were in jail during the Communist era and then went on to become politicians and journalists. I don't want to see all that being undone now.

Q: You've been accused of fear-mongering about Russia, and about Vladimir Putin. How do you respond?

A: If I sound alarmist, it's because I'm alarmed. I travel all over the region and I see that Russia's pushing back hard. I also worry about what's happening inside Russia. I'm not prepared to sit back and say Russia's always been authoritarian and imperialist and we have to get on with it. It's not good for Russians and it's certainly not good for us.

Q: You do, however, compare the West's view of Russia today to the one we held in the 1930s. You also draw a parallel to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Nazi Germany.

A: I'm trying to wake people up. I think we've been in a pretty deep sleep about Russia. There's been a lot of wishful thinking, and I use the comparisons with the Third Reich because it's important to remember that the two totalitarian empires were pretty similar before the war. Stalin was killing more people than Hitler at that time, and we tend to forget how much the Soviet totalitarian past still overshadows Russia. So I make the historical comparisons so people will remember. When Putin says the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [of non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, which divided the potential spoils of war in eastern Europe] is legal, that would be as shocking as if a German leader said the anschluss, or the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, was legal. It's as shocking, in a way, to have a former KGB official running Russia as it would be to have a former SS colonel running Germany.

Q: Why do we project hope rather than pessimism onto Russia?

A: Part of it is just mental laziness. We've gotten used to the idea that Russia's okay, that it's a partner. That's a very comforting position, and it's been the dominant theme in the West for 10 years now. I just don't think it's justified by facts anymore.

Q: One of the pivotal developments in post-Soviet Russia has been the rise of former KGB operatives and their transformation into a political force. Did the rest of the world fail to grasp what was happening?

A: The KGB made a slow comeback. Pictures of the statue in front of [KGB headquarters] being pulled down as the Cold War ended made us feel that it had been toppled, just like the Stasi in East Germany. It came quite close to that; they had a hemorrhaging during that time where people went into the private sector, and the rest of the world wrote off the KGB as a force. In actual fact, it was being relabelled and topped up throughout the 1990s. The old spymaster Yevgeny Primakov came back to head the foreign intelligence service, and by the time Putin became head of what is now the FSB, he didn't look that different from the previous lot. When Putin became prime minister [in 1999], Primakov had already been in that position, too. And then we had this series of spectacular terrorist attacks in Moscow, blamed on the Chechens, which gave Putin the perfect opportunity to be tough. Soon after that came 9/11, and Putin said he was onside on the war on terror. We were in the mood for someone pretty tough to run Russia.

Q: Dmitri Medvedev, the president-elect, is not specifically a product of that milieu, though. He is often dismissed as Putin's poodle, but he has given voice to some liberal-sounding ideas about freedom and the rule of law. Are we short-selling him?

A: He's been a very efficient, loyal sidekick to Putin. And yes, there's always a chance that Medvedev's liberal rhetoric will turn into something in practice. But we didn't see it when he was running Gazprom, the state-controlled oil company. It was very opaque and inefficiently run. If he is a born-again crusader for legality and transparency, it's not borne out by his record.

Q: Can Putin maintain his current level of influence from the PM's position?

A: You know, Stalin was never prime minister or president. He was just general secretary of the party. It may be that Putin will go back to being chairman of United Russia [his political party]. I don't think he's going to stay as prime minister, because there's too much responsibility, and the prime minister gets blamed for everything. In the past few years, when things went wrong Putin has blamed prime ministers and has even sacked them. As chair of United Russia, you're basically unsackable and it has become the party of power. Personally, I think he'd like to come back as president, and that will require Medvedev to change the constitution.

Q: I think a lot of Westerners will be struck — shocked maybe — by your conclusion as to how Putin solidified power. You point to a series of bombings on apartment buildings in 1999 that killed hundreds of Russians and provided the grounds for the war in Chechnya. Do you think that Moscow was responsible for those?

A: Whether they were directly ordered, whether they were encouraged, I don't think we'll ever know. What is absolutely clear is that the official story about the Ryazan bomb [an attempt thwarted after an observant citizen spotted suspicious activity at his apartment building that turned out to be FSB agents] doesn't make sense — in fact, really stinks. The official version is that two FSB guys from Moscow steal a car, go to Ryazan, buy sugar at a market, buy cartridges, have a detonator with them and plant these sacks in an apartment block — all as a test of anti-terrorist vigilance on the part of the public. It just doesn't add up. Apart from the fact the Chechens have never done anything like it, the authorities were utterly unable to come up with a likely explanation when they were caught by the locals with what appeared be real explosives. So they switched stories and made up this thing about sugar. There's no definitive proof, but the balance of evidence is that the authorities were involved.

Q: You make the case that Russia is currently only a menace to its neighbours, but is on a dangerous trajectory. How do you get the West interested in Russia if its misbehaviour affects only those within the region?

A: It's true that, unlike the last Cold War, this is mainly a European show. What does interest the West is the Baltics, which are now our NATO allies. When members of the [Kremlin-supported] Nashi youth movement blockaded the Estonian embassy [in April 2007] and mobbed the Swedish ambassador's car as it tried to visit, an Estonian diplomat friend of mine described the collective Western response this way: "Oh my goodness, they're attacking white people now!" It made people feel like the Estonians weren't just saying they were in trouble, they actually were in trouble. Likewise, the cyber-attack on Estonia last April got top Western intelligence agencies interested. It was the first time we'd seen a big cyber-attack like that, and it came within a whisker of being quite serious. The other thing that is very important is energy. America is very interested in energy security right now, of getting gas out of the Caspian and trying to break Russia's hold on Central Asia. For that reason alone, I think Russia is of great interest to America.

Q: You do portray Western corporations and stock markets as the Kremlin's enablers, for putting profit and business ahead of the West's new allies. Can you explain why?

A: We've dropped almost all of our standards when it comes to Russian business, and we've got to get back a smell test. I'm all in favour of integrating legitimate businesses into Western stock markets. My problem is with what I call para-statal entities — phony companies like Gazprom, which are basically the oil and gas divisions of Kremlin Inc. and which can't answer questions on ownership and related party transactions in a way that would satisfy a tough regulator in New York. But they're allowed to come to London instead, and I think that's wrong. I secondly worry about the way non-listed companies are able to use Western banks, law firms and accountants to divert money from shareholders of Gazprom and other companies. I think we've completely lost our moral compass.

Q: I think there's confusion in the West, even at the highest political levels, of the degree to which Putin reflects the popular will. If Russians really want what he provides, what can the rest of the world really do?

A: First, one has to pick apart whether he's really doing what Russians want. I think a lot of pro-Putin sentiment is actually anti-Yeltsin, anti-1990s reaction against a ghastly time that we've perhaps underestimated. Secondly, a lot of what appears to be pro-Putin sentiment is actually propaganda staged for television and that sort of thing. Then there's the high price of oil. While on the surface one can say Putin is very popular, one just has to ask if Putin had Yeltsin's oil price and vice versa, what Putin's popularity ranking might be. So I don't think this pro-Putin stuff is completely solid, and I don't think we can abandon the people in Russia to this idea that the country is all about authoritarianism and empire. Russia also has a fantastic history of brave campaigning for human rights and freedom. It's almost racist to say, oh, the Russians don't really want democracy.

Q: Any response out of Russia to your book?

A: The Kremlin and the embassy in London have turned down my publisher's invitations to publicly debate me. Not from official Russia. I do get extremely unpleasant emails, including one that invited me to "come and taste our polonium." A person with thinner skin might be intimidated.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

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Interview

This Guest Interview by Bill Steigerwald, columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Mother Russia Is a Bear — An Interview with Edward Lucas

By Bill Steigerwald

Look out for Mother Russia. The nation that emerged from the ruins of communism is not as dangerous to the world or as nasty to its own people as the old Soviet Union. But a new book by Edward Lucas, former Moscow bureau chief of The Economist, warns that Vladimir Putin and the ex-KGB thugs running oil-rich Russia have stifled the freedom of their citizens and turned their country into a menacing bully. I recently talked to Lucas in London by phone about his book “The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West.”

=Q: When you say “the Kremlin is menacing the West” in the title of your United Kingdom edition, who and what do you mean by Kremlin?

=A: When I say “Kremlin,” I mean the ex-KGB people who run Russia. They took piece-by-piece in the 1990s, when the attempt to liquidate the old KGB failed. Mr. Putin came back as prime minister in 1999, when the Yeltsin regime was on its last legs, and then as president in 2000, and that’s really the first time in Russian history that the secret police have actually run the country. That’s had several bad, I would say even deplorable, effects.

Q: Such as?

A: First of all, it’s authoritarianism. We’ve seen the hollowing out and crippling and in some cases the destruction of all the institutions that bring the rule of law and political freedom. The media that really matters, i.e., television, is very closely controlled by the Kremlin. The legislative branch is turned into just a mere sounding board for the executive branch, whereas in the Yeltsin years it was rambunctious and independent if quite corrupt. Although Russians live a great deal better than they used to, because living standards have shot up and life is a lot more stable and predictable, it’s also a lot less free.

Q: What do the Russian people themselves have to fear the most from the Kremlin?

A: The worst legacy of the Putin years is that it stopped Russia from being where it belongs, which is in what one might call “The Greater West.” They’ve darkened Russia’s image abroad so that the country is seen as a corrupt, sinister bully in many eyes. They’ve also failed to create the sort of institutions that you need to have a really modern economy

Q: What do Putin and his gang want? To re-establish the old Soviet Union, exert economic influence over all of Europe, be a superpower again?

A: They certainly don’t want to re-establish the old Soviet Union because they were there when it collapsed and they know it didn’t work. So instead of going for the 100 percent control, which is what the Soviet Union attempted, they are going for 80 percent control. So as long as you control the television, you don’t need to worry about the newspapers, would be one example. They control the commanding heights of the economy but they have no desire to control small business, which was of course illegal in the Soviet Union.

They don’t want to re-conquer Eastern Europe by military means because they know that doesn’t work. But it’s much more effective to use a mixture of energy blackmail and cash. As far as the West is concerned, they want to “finlandize” us — rather as Finland became a kind of neutral, rather impotent country during the Cold War, they want the kind of moral findlandization of the West, where they buy their way into our institutions so that we are no longer able to resist them.

Q: Pat Buchanan and others here would say the West has ticked off Russia by doing things like letting Eastern European countries into NATO. Does Russia have a legitimate reason to be annoyed at us?

A: We have to distinguish between things that Russia is truly and justifiably annoyed about and things which are more manufactured hysterics. Now in terms of threats to Russia’s security, China is far bigger than anything NATO even could do, let alone does. So I think I would discount Russian complaints about that, particularly as it’s the Russian opposition to NATO expansion that’s fueled this. I think where Russia does have a point is on strategic nuclear weapons in space. Russia is still the second power after the United States and this administration has been rather cavalier, to put it mildly, in its treatment of Russia on that. We tore up the ABM treaty and didn’t launch proper talks on a new big treaty on nuclear weapons. It would be in America’s interest to have deep cuts on both sides and rough parity, because dominance in nuclear weapons doesn’t make you safer, it just makes the other guy twitchier and therefore potentially more risky.

Q: What do you think the U.S. or the West should do to show Putin we won’t let him get away with some of this stuff?

A: The most important thing is that we need to regain the moral high ground. We had at the end of the last Cold War great moral authority. Our system not only worked but it was freer and fairer and kinder and more attractive than the Soviet system, which had hit bankruptcy in every way. I think we have lost a lot of that.

Q: What are the consequences if we don’t get on a better footing with Russia?

A: The old Cold War risked nuclear obliteration or the triumph of communist rule internationally, and we’re not facing those. But we are facing the loss of our allies in Eastern Europe, for a start, because Russia is pushing back hard there. We face the end of the Atlantic Alliance, with Europe and America going off in different directions. We face, I think most gravely, this kind of moral findlandization, where Russia by paying the right lobbyists and the right law firms in America or by putting money in the right political parties and paying the right politicians in Europe, pretty much gets what it wants and we lose the self-confidence that we used to have that we live in a free and law-governed society.