NORTHERN EXPOSURE
In recent years, no region has preoccupied Russian attention in terms of energy more than the Arctic. Over the past decade, climatological changes have made more and more of the previously inhospitable region accessible to oil and natural gas exploration, with dramatic results. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic seabed may hold as much as ninety billion barrels of oil and a third of the world’s untapped natural gas reserves. 40These findings have sparked renewed interest from oil companies, as well as from the “Arctic Five” nations—Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States—whose borders abut the region.
But in Moscow the new findings have done much more. Russian policymakers’ hopes for an energy renaissance depend on the Arctic, and they have made the acquisition of a greater stake in the area a cardinal national priority. Then President Dmitry Medvedev said as much in September 2008, when he told a meeting of his National Security Council, “[o]ur first and main task is to turn the Arctic into a resource base for Russia in the 21st century.” 41
Since then, the Kremlin has set about crafting a legal framework for dominating the region. It has done so because the Arctic lacks its own legal regime, relying instead upon the rules and regulations contained in the 1972 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Under them, each of the “Arctic Five” nations is allowed to stake a claim to roughly two hundred miles of Arctic territory beyond its demarcated northern border. (The rest is considered part of the “global commons,” over which no nation can claim sovereignty.)
Moscow has cited UNCLOS in its expanding claims to the region. Over the past decade, it has asserted that the so-called Lomonosov Ridge, a massive undersea geological formation in the Arctic Ocean, is part of its sovereign continental shelf and, therefore, that it is solely entitled to its resources. (That position is contested by Canada and Denmark, which claim to have evidence that the Ridge is rightly part of the North American continent.) In 2007, Russia even sent an expedition to the North Pole to plant an undersea flag on the Ridge as proof of its territorial claim. 42
But Moscow has also attempted to refashion the region’s geopolitical order to reflect its own interests. In March 2009 it publicly released the full text of its new Arctic strategy, entitled The Foundations of Russian Federation Policy in the Arctic until 2020 and Beyond. 43That document, first issued in September 2008, lays out a dramatic expansion of official Russian sovereign interests in the area. According to the strategy, the Arctic zone represents “a national strategic resource base” for the country—one that is “capable in large part of fulfilling Russia’s needs for hydrocarbon resources.” As such, Russia must systematically develop the region and create “a system of complex security for the defense of the territories, population, and objects in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation critically vital to Russian national security from threats of a natural and technical character.” 44
Russia has moved forward with these objectives. Economically, it has encouraged large-scale and sustained investment in the region on the part of Western multinationals such as BP, as well as Russian firms (including state natural gas giant Gazprom). Militarily, Moscow has worked to make the region its own exclusive strategic purview. In 2011, the Russian Ministry of Defence announced plans to station two army brigades in the Arctic in order to expand Russia’s presence in the region and “defend its interests” there. 45It has also begun construction on a fleet of new submarines to better “protect Moscow’s interests in the icy North.” 46And in early 2013, Russian warplanes began regular patrols of the Arctic Ocean. 47
For the time being, officials in Moscow have discussed the need for multilateralism in managing the Arctic. 48But the strategy that Russia has adopted over the past half-decade is unilateral and increasingly aggressive. It is no wonder that more than a few people now fear that an “Arctic cold war” might be imminent. 49
TROUBLE AHEAD
Although it appears consolidated from the outside, Putin’s state today rests on unstable foundations. These systemic flaws have forced Russian authorities to adopt an increasingly repressive and authoritarian approach at home.
But this situation has the potential to become much, much worse. For, although the effects may not be immediately apparent to casual observers of Russian politics, the demographic, political, and ethnic trends at work within the country’s borders are already threatening its internal stability, as well as its relationship with the world.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MISUNDERSTANDING THE MUSLIM WORLD
In October 2003, in a move that went mostly unnoticed in the West, Vladimir Putin traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to attend the annual summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, known today as the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Putin’s mission was clear. As he told the assembled delegates, “Russian Muslims are an inseparable, full-fledged, and active part of the multiethnic and multi-denominational nation of Russia.” 1Accordingly, the Russian president said, his government should be granted observer status in the fifty-seven-nation bloc.
Although Russia’s request was denied at that time (it was granted in 2005), Putin’s voyage was nonetheless significant. It signaled a concrete recognition by the Kremlin that Russia is, or soon will be, an “Islamic state.” 2The fact that it was carried out despite significant opposition from entrenched elites in Moscow—from the siloviki, members of Russia’s security and armed forces whom Putin saw as his traditional power base, to the oligarchs that had grown rich from the country’s energy sector—made it all the more telling. 3
RUSSIA’S RETURN
It also represented a historic reversal. For much of the past century, Russia’s relationship with the Islamic world has been both complex and acrimonious. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union attempted to engage a variety of anti-Western regimes and actors in the Middle East, from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. It had some success, mostly thanks to the efforts of Yevgeny Primakov, the wily spymaster who served as the KGB’s point man for the region during the 1970s and 1980s. 4But the Soviet Union’s atheist ideology, and its 1979 intervention in Afghanistan—an act that prompted the world’s first global jihad—made it a focal point of Muslim anger throughout much of the USSR’s later years.
The Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and its subsequent dissolution, reconfigured Moscow’s relationship with the Muslim world, which was quick to embrace the five majority-Muslim republics of Central Asia. Russia, however, remained a problem, with the conflict in Chechnya drawing significant ire from Islamic states in the Russian Federation’s first years. During the same period, a pro-Western foreign policy (championed by then foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev) helped to relegate Russia to the sidelines of regional politics. 5