Dan,
I would interpret Russia’s gas shutoffs as a hardball Russian style of negotiation, but ultimately, seeking a logical end – that Ukraine and Belarus should not receive the same Russian gas at a rate one quarter of what the end users (Germany, Austria) were paying merely because the export trunk lines crossed their territory. They didn’t refer to Timoshenko as “The Gas Princess” in Kiev for nothing, but what Western media outlet was going to give you the Yanukovich point of view? Hardly none, especially when James Carville was working for the Orange side. The fact that the Russians used the same “pay more or get cut off” tactics with their erstwhile ally Belarus as with Kiev tells me it was motivated more by Gazprom’s need to get more revenues to simply maintain production than politics. Not that politics can ever be separated from the oil and gas business, especially when we are talking about pipelines and cartel member producers.
And as for Wretch’s contention that the Kremlin admitted to killing Litvinenko, I’m not sure where he is getting that, but it seemed to have come from a BBC report this week that Medvedev described as an attempt by some in Britain to scuttle UK-Russian relations.
While I do not subscribe to the suggestion that there is any real anti-Russian conspiracy out there, I do think there are wealthy exiled Russians like Mr. Berezovsky that have a vested interest in screwed up relations, lest the Russian prosecutors that came to London in 2006 before Litvinenko and Politkovskaya were conveniently killed return presenting their case for extradition. And of course, these extradition issues only came up after the UK became the leading investor in Russia. Mr. Litvinenko, you may recall, worked for Berezovsky, whom the late Forbes journalist Paul Klebnikov viewed as perfectly capable of homicide.
As far as Russia being inherently aggressive, there is almost no conventional arms buildup, the nuclear stockpiles are stagnant or declining, to the point that some Western analysts provided the more paranoid Russians with bulletin board material by arguing that Russia is now vulnerable to a disarming first strike. Although Russia is no longer losing territory like it was in the early 90s it is losing 700,000 people a year, and its demographic profile (getting older and less healthy before it gets rich) would not seem to support much aggression. If anything, the Kremlin probably perceives the biggest threat to Russia, as in 1998, as a global economic shock. The collapse of world commodity prices in 1997 (which the siloviki partially blame the oligarchs for, since they were exporting Russia’s raw materials at dirt cheap prices) compounded the crisis that led to a backclash, or a return to equilibrium under Putin. A similar shock to the Russian economy, this time not from cheap commodity prices but from sky high food prices fueling inflation for basic staples, could bring back the instability that the Kremlin fears.
While the Western Left has largely become oblivious to Russia, I don’t understand why so many conservatives remain woefully ignorant about the Russian economy and its growing financial interdependence with the rest of the world. While flooding the world with cheap Saudi oil to bring down the USSR in the late 80s probably was a stroke of brilliance (in spite of the price paid here in the U.S. oil patch) trying to provoke the further breakup of rump Russia in my view is simple insanity – it is more or less proceeding on autopilot as if nothing has really changed since 1984. With Russians able to read what the NYT thinks of their country online, and a rising middle class able to travel to Europe, I would say that Russia has undergone revolutionary change for the better. There is no going back to a Soviet type regime, but I do think it is possible that if we don’t get food and energy prices under control worldwide Russia could take a turn that would make Putin seem quite soft and liberal in comparison.
