#7
Vremya Novostei
October 19, 2001
A SHARP TURN
No one expected the
president to make such a sharp turn to the West Moscow abandons all ambitions to
be a super-power
Author: Fedor Lukianov, Aleksei Slobodin
[from WPS Monitoring
Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN WILL COME TO HIS MEETING WITH PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH TOMORROW WITH A GIFT NO ONE EXPECTED FROM HIM: MOSCOW'S DECISION TO CLOSE DOWN ITS MILITARY FACILITIES IN VIETNAM AND CUBA. PRESIDENT BUSH HAS ALREADY PRAISED THIS DECISION TO LET GO OF THE COLD WAR ERA.
President Vladimir Putin will come to his meeting with President George W. Bush tomorrow with a gift no one expected from him. Moscow's decision to close down its military facilities in Vietnam and Cuba (the Lourdes radar installation was a particular annoyance for Washington) appears to be a resolute move toward the recent enemy. The West is already impressed with how Russia is supporting the US in the Afghanistan campaign, and no further generous gestures are needed to strengthen the impression. All the same, Putin must have decided to go all the way and secure Russia a stable and respectable place in the Western club.
The United States and Russia are getting rid of Cold War relics, Bush announced. (He considers the ABM treaty of 1972 another relic which Russian diplomacy has been fighting to preserve all these years.) Havana disagrees with the Kremlin's intentions.
Lourdes ELINT center falls under the joint jurisdiction of the GRU (army intelligence), General Staff, and the Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and Information. Constructed in 1964, all these years the center has compiled data on arms control within the framework of bilateral accords, intercepted telephone calls and e-mail across a sizeable part of American territory. The center also keeps on eye on American submarines and provides communications with Russian military and civilian facilities (submarines, embassies, etc) in the Western Hemisphere. Defense Minister of Cuba Raul Castro believes that Russian intelligence gets from the Lourdes installation 75% of all information it has.
Havana's irritation is easily understandable. The center was earning it $200 million worth of rent every year, payments made in the form of timber, fuel and products of the Russian military-industrial complex for the Cuban army. All the same, nature never tolerates vacuum. In May 1999 the Cubans signed an accord with China on construction of a Chinese intercept center on the island.
Beijing is showing some interest in KamRanh as well. The naval base and the airfield, built by the Americans in the 1960s, was offered by Vietnam to the Soviet Union free of charge in 1979. Fairly soon the base became the Soviet Navy's largest facility abroad, and a regiment of strategic TU-95s was based at the airfield. In 1998, six years before the lease expiry date, Hanoi asked for $200 million of annual rent and payment of debts accumulated since 1991.
Both facilities from which Russia is now pulling were symbols indicating Moscow's worldwide interests. The decision to close down the base and the center means that Moscow is saying farewell to these old ambitions. Needless to say, the West will be glad. The matter is not restricted only to the circles that distrusted and feared Russia. Even loyal experts used to say that attempts to retain the semblance of a super-power (the essence of the Kremlin's foreign policy in the second half of the 1990s) only distracted the country.
In any case, the turn from Primakov's concept of a multipolar world Moscow promoted these five years to acceptance of American idea of "you are with us or with terrorists" was so sharp that most representatives of the Russian elite were caught unprepared. President's initiatives are supported out of sheer inertia but many start asking the question of "What all this is for?" If Putin goes on the way he has been going on, the unity of the nomenclature-army-party ranks may crumble and a real opposition will appear.
The president will prove correctness of the policy only if the West does throw its doors open and Russia feels it. Otherwise the pendulum may swing in the opposite direction.
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