While warning against ‘militarization’ of outer space, especially placing weaponry into orbit – something that for the foreseeable future only the US is capable of undertaking – Putin also made it clear that Russia and the US shared interests in world security, and nowhere more so than in the field of non-proliferation. To preserve the nuclear oligarchy expressed in the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 had been the guiding principle for the superpowers during the Cold War, and Putin was certainly not willing to part, for short-term gain, with this essential strategy. Without specifically mentioning North Korea, Iran or other potential offenders, he made it clear that Russia and the US still had strategic interests in common.
Conflict and competition
But conflict and competition were the leitmotif, not the unavoidable strategic bargains of the future, dictated by technology and necessity. In particular, Putin made it clear that separating the future of Kosovo from Serbia would meet with fierce resistance from Russia. The Kremlin would use its veto in the UN Security Council, thus dealing a deadly blow to the UN-sponsored Ahtisaari Plan, presented only a few days before at the Security Council, for a controlled and peaceful settlement under the formula of ‘supervised sovereignty’. He certainly did not attach much importance to the remaining attempts of the Kosovo trio, consisting of US, Russian and EU diplomats, to deactivate the bomb ticking, once again, in the Balkans. Putin made it clear that NATO’s military intervention and air war in the spring of 1999 to stop Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians had not been forgotten, let alone forgiven.
Not that Russia had a better or more sustainable formula to offer for Balkan stability, but Kosovo was one of the items on the global agenda where Putin wanted to make it clear, beyond any doubt, that little or nothing could be achieved against Russia. Serbia, traditionally the overlord of the Kosovo Albanians, was an old ally and protégé of Russia since the wars of the tsars against the Ottoman Empire and the rivalries with Austria – Belgrade was seen as Russian turf where Western nations should tread carefully. At a later stage, at the G8 meeting in the upmarket seaside resort of Heiligendamm in the summer of 2007, Putin even warned Western nations that to allow Kosovo separation from Serbia would mean defeat for ‘Christianity’ in its epic struggle against Islam – recalling the age-old protector role that Russia had traditionally claimed over orthodox lands.
With this timely warning on Kosovo the Tsar’s anger was not yet exhausted. What followed was an attack on the US project of missile defence against future Iranian nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. The giant radar to be placed, controversially, somewhere south of Prague in the Czech Republic to control the flightpath of future Iranian intercontinental missiles across Europe to the US was anathema to Putin, as was the proposal for complementary missile positions further north in Poland to shoot down whatever threat came from Southern shores. Putin claimed that these future US deployments were nothing but a thinly veiled threat against Russia. He linked the plan to the recent US renunciation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1973, banning major anti-missile deployments between the superpowers, that the Bush administration had indeed cancelled not so long ago – much to the anger and annoyance of the Russians. But the Russian president must have known from his military intelligence sources that the new project, still in its infancy, would not have the capacity, nor be in a location to upset the largely abstract balance of nuclear-tipped missiles between the US and Russia.
Shooting down the anti-missile missiles
So why did Putin raise the issue of the anti-missile missiles? There seemed to be three principal reasons. First, Russia wanted to be consulted and was not, neither in the NATO-Russia Council nor in high-level meetings – and Putin knew of course that the White House had not made much effort to refer the divisive issue to the councils of NATO but had chosen the bilateral route with the East European countries concerned. Second, placing anti-missile installations into former satellite countries was, in Russian eyes, a clear breach if not in the letter then certainly in the spirit of the Two plus Four Agreement on Germany and NATO deployments. Third, Putin must have sensed that the project would invite massive protest throughout Europe against US deployments, especially in Germany among those middle-aged social democrats and greens who wanted to relive their youth and re-enact the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s. That had been the last major Cold War confrontation, provoking to no small extent not only the rise of the German greens but also the downfall of the lib-lab Schmidt-Genscher government in the autumn of 1982 and the rise of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Why not use the issue to sow discord among NATO countries and between the US and the rest?
This may have been a short-lived tactical consideration, accentuated, however, by a Russian general’s boastful announcement that those irritating sites in Eastern Europe would be high on the list of potential targets for Russia’s missiles. Tactical, because after that Munich confrontation it took only a few months for the Kremlin to offer the US the use of a former Soviet radar site in Azerbaijan, a few hundred miles north of the Iranian border. The Pentagon’s experts, dispatched to examine the place, found the installation in a derelict state, the data-processing different from American systems and the area too close to the potential source of trouble to provide much reassurance. But after a while other US experts saw much virtue in the proposal. Moreover, the Russian offer took the steam out of the West European debate and should therefore, notwithstanding technical shortcomings, be part of any future anti-missile system.
In strategic terms, the Russians did not follow the US rationale for putting up anti-missile defences against Iran long before the Iranians had operational nuclear capacity, let alone the ability to operate and launch intercontinental missiles. No wonder, then, that the US plans created suspicion in Moscow. The Russians also continue to believe in deterrence. Why, they asked, should an Iranian regime, once it had control over nuclear weapons, risk the very existence of the country by firing nuclear missiles at the US – or, for that matter, at Israel’s population centres around Tel Aviv and Haifa – and be annihilated in turn?
It was ironic that, only hours before Putin gave his speech in Munich, Russian defence minister Sergei Ivanov, at the time almost an alter ego of Putin’s, had invited me to an exclusive interview on the margins of the same conference. In our conversation Ivanov stated, on the record, that whatever the Americans were planning to put into the Czech Republic and Poland, would be – ‘if, God forbid, a confrontation should occur’ – no match for Russia’s superior missile forces. Here spoke the man responsible for Russian defence, and he was obviously out of sync with the alarmist version soon after to be promoted by the President. But Ivanov, too, wondered why, long before the Iranians had enough fissile material for a single bomb, let alone had mastered nuclear weapons technology, the US was already signalling that it had given up hope of keeping the Iranian within the restrictions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. As far as Iranian missiles were concerned, Ivanov stated that according to Russian intelligence their maximum reach was about 1700 kilometres, and that intercontinental missiles would be, for a long time to come, out of reach of the Iranians. Ivanov moreover, revealed that the Russians too were worried about what the Iranian regime was up to. ‘We realize that Iran with its present arsenal of missiles has the capacity to threaten not only the state of Israel but also Russian territory. This is a matter of great concern.’