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The Resurgent Russian Bear
By Jeremy Sharon   December 10, 2006

"I shall be an autocrat, that's my trade". Thus quipped the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, who stamped Russian authority onto the international stage, seizing vast swathes of territory and establishing Russia as a formidable power in the middle of the eighteenth century. It appears that Vladimir Putin has taken her example to heart.

Buoyed up by high energy prices, Putin has embarked on an aggressive foreign policy agenda which seeks to re-establish Russia as a pre-eminent international power in opposition to what it perceives to be American and European hegemony. This foreign policy agenda is based around two primary goals, namely tightening Russian control over the former Soviet Republics and tightening alliances and friendships with like-minded states and in areas of strategic importance.

To Israel's detriment, it appears that Moscow has identified the Middle East as a primary region through which to recapture its former international significance. Russia has sought to present itself to the Arabs as a more neutral arbiter than the U.S. in order to increase its international influence in this strategic region of the world.

To this end, Moscow has courted some of the most noxious regimes in the neighbourhood and provided them with sophisticated weaponry and diplomatic support which has been extremely damaging to Israel's interests. A further complication to this state of affairs is that Israel imports a large percentage of its oil from Russia, as much as seventy percent according to some analysts, rendering diplomatic protests and threats somewhat toothless.

Putin's invitation to Hamas top-brass for talks in Moscow in March 2006 was a prime example of Russia's antagonistic foreign policy. It was a cynical attempt to increase Russian influence with the Palestinians with the additional benefit of underlining the independence of Russian foreign policy from the U.S. and the West.

Why else would a country, which has experienced the horrors of Islamist terrorism like the Beslan school massacre, court Hamas which has been one of the pioneers of the Islamic terrorist creed?

Russia's arms sales to Israel's neighbours have also been hugely problematic. In December 2005, Russia signed a contract with Iran to deliver around thirty TOR-M1 air-defence systems and began to deliver them in late 2006, even as debates in the UN Security Council were underway regarding possible sanctions of Iran over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment.

The TOR-M1 is one of the most advanced air-defence systems in the world capable of shooting down planes at low-altitude as well as precision guided munitions and cruise missiles. Iran will place these systems around its sensitive nuclear installations in Isfahan, Bushehr and others and will give the Iranian regime even greater confidence to defy international insistence that it halt its uranium enrichment and comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In April 2005, Russia also completed the sale of advanced "Igla" anti-aircraft missiles to Syria and was only dissuaded from selling its "Iskander-E", 300km range tactical missile to Syria by strong American pressure. Russia also sold large numbers of advanced anti-tank missiles to Syria and Iran during the 1990s, some of which were subsequently transferred to Hizballah and used to deadly effect against Israeli soldiers and tanks in the Israel-Lebanon war this summer.

During the war, Israeli troops found the sophisticated Russian anti-tank Kornet missile in abandoned Hizballah positions with the words "Customer: Ministry of Defence of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia" written on them. The Russian made RPG-29 was also used by Hizballah during the war.

The republics of the former Soviet empire or, as the Kremlin refers to them, Russia's "Near Abroad" have been the other major target of Russia's new assertiveness. For example, Moscow has unabashedly promoted separatism in Georgia's breakaway territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in response to Georgia's pro-Western orientation and its attempts to join NATO. Russia's other truculent former vassal, Ukraine, has also been displeasing its former master of late, with Kiev's tightening relationship with NATO being a major factor behind Russia's antagonism.

In January this year, Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian gas giant and world's largest gas producer, turned off the gas supply to Ukraine after price-negotiations broke down. Prices have also been steeply increased for the Baltic states which all turned away from Russia's orbit and joined the EU in 2004.

By contrast, Putin has propped up Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus' authoritarian ruler, with cheap energy, loans and political support, and the two countries have a loose agreement to form a political union. Support for Lukashenko, who won re-election in 2006 in a deeply flawed poll, comes precisely because Lukashenko is loyal to Moscow and has a similar anti-Western outlook to Putin. Belarus' panoply of human rights abuses and poisonous foreign policies, like arms sales to Iran, are immaterial to the Kremlin (which indulges in much worse anyway) next to the importance of preserving its anti-Western alliance.

Moscow has also not shied away from military action to preserve Russian control of its dominions. The two devastating wars which Russia has fought in Chechnya, in which over 200,000 Chechen civilians have been killed, is the clearest and most brutal example of Russia's determination to maintain an iron-grip on its outlying regions and territories.

The establishment and strengthening of multi-lateral alliances such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), consisting of the former Soviet Central Asian Republics and China, is an important tool for Moscow in its efforts to counter what it sees as the encroachment of Western influence into the traditional spheres of Russian authority. Russia has also increasingly aligned itself with China to form a bulwark against Western dominance of global affairs and has advanced this alliance through arms sales, joint war-games and by building pipelines to China to quench Beijing's thirst for oil and gas.

Further enhancing its reputation as arms supplier to the world's tyrannical regimes, Russia sold twelve MiG-29 warplanes to Sudan in 2002, a country whose government has been complicit in the genocide of approximately 400,000 people in Sudan's western province of Darfur.

Russian energy companies have also signed contracts for the development and exploitation of oil resources in Sudan and have agreed to increase "cooperation in the exploitation and development of oil and gas fields and the transportation, utilization and sale of gas" in Iran.

In light of these commercial interests it is easy to see why Moscow has threatened to use its veto in the Security Council to block meaningful sanctions against Sudan which would seek to halt the ongoing ethnic-cleansing there, and against Iran to force it to cease its uranium enrichment programme. Moscow's one billion dollar contract to build Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor has also clearly influenced this attitude.

The recent spate of politically motivated killings of prominent Russian critics of Putin and the Chechen Wars point to possible Kremlin connivance and testify to the government's growing authoritarian nature. They also illustrate Moscow's extreme sensitivity to criticism of its foreign policy and its unwillingness to brook dissent. The poisoning and death of former KGB Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Litvinenko in November is just one in a series of assassinations of those who have drawn the Kremlin's ire.

The deaths of Litvinenko, Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov in April 2003 and Duma DeputyYuri Shchekochikhin in July of the same year are all linked by the fact that these individuals had accused the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) of coordinating the Russian apartment bombings of 1999, which killed over three hundred people, in order to give Russia a pretext for starting the second Chechen war. The evidence relating to the key event supporting this allegation was sealed by the Duma for seventy-five years. The slaying of the prominent war-critic Anna Politkovskaya in October appears to offer similar testimony to Moscow's ruthless attitude to its opponents.

Russia remains a formidable power in global affairs and Moscow is positioning itself at the nexus of an international movement to defy and oppose Western influence. It is clear that Russia is forging ahead with its plans to re-capture its former authority and that its malign influence is spreading out over the Middle East, much of Asia and beyond as well. What is not clear is if, and how, the West will try to rein in the Resurgent Bear.

The Resurgent Russian Bear (http://web.israelinsider.com/views/10046.htm)