Original source URL: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081607G.shtml#1 http://www.letemps.ch/template/tempsFort.asp?page=3&article=212820 [French] When Russia Bares Its Teeth By Stéphane Bussard Le Temps Tuesday 14 August 2007 A day no longer goes by that Russia does not assert its power. To impose respect and repair the humiliations of the Yeltsin years, how far is Vladimir Putin prepared to go? "Ten years ago, such an event would have been impossible." Wellesley University Professor Marshall Goldman, who has on several occasions met with Michael Gorbatchev, Boris Yeltsin and, more recently, Vladimir Putin, refers to the Russian expedition at the beginning of August. Scientists sent by the Kremlin plunged more than 4,000 meters into the Arctic Ocean to plant a Russian flag there. Sovereignty over this site abounding in hydrocarbons is contested between Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway. From a technological point of view, few nations can boast the ability to access such depths. Russia shows a new interest in polar exploration, a discipline it had abandoned for twenty years. The American Russia expert summarizes the episode in one sentence: "Russia is back." In 1998, the reign of President Yeltsin had transformed the former Soviet Empire into a doormat for the West. Today, Moscow holds the third-highest level of foreign exchange reserves in the world after China and Japan. That commands respect. With a rediscovered confidence after the difficult Yeltsin years, not a day passes that Russia does not go on the offensive to show that it has once again become a key actor. Last week, on the same day that anti-Russian Georgia accused Moscow of having fired a missile close to a village in that Caucasian state, the Russian Navy proceeded to fire a ballistic missile from a nuclear submarine based in the Pacific Ocean. Obviously, the Kremlin did not fear the international press's conflation of the two events. On August 8, Russian bombers effected an aerial passage close to the American Guam base in the Pacific as a provocation. These offensives have one objective: one no longer treats Moscow as any old power, but as a country that commands respect. "In her day, Margaret Thatcher declared to the annual Munich Security Conference - not without condescension - that she could do business with Gorbatchev. In 2006, it's Putin who asserted that his country could do business with Texan George Bush," Marshall Goldman relates with some irony. Vladimir Putin reacted virulently to the American anti-missile shield project that allows for the installation of bases in the Czech Republic and in Poland. He threatened to deploy cruise missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave and to point them at Europe. And he announced on Sunday that he envisaged endowing his country with an anti-missile shield between now and 2015. This show of strength produced results. Now the Americans are the first to want to make Russia a partner. In an editorial published August 10 in the International Herald Tribune, former American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger deemed it necessary to take Putin's proposition - voiced during the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, to install anti-missile radars in Azerbaijan rather than Eastern Europe - into account. "America must be more sensitive to Russian complexity, [...] since many global problems can be better solved thanks to Russian-American cooperation." Richard Nixon's former righthand man even thinks that linking American, Russian and NATO anti-missile systems would constitute a "historic" step, allowing for dealing with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and jihadism. In reality, it would also be a means for Washington to prevent the emergence of a Russian-Chinese axis that is evolving at the center of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. How to explain this Russian comeback? There is energy, above all. Moscow is fully profiting from the high prices of the oil and gas the country abounds in. The country's cumulative growth over the last seven years rises to close to 50 percent, or nearly seven percent a year. "Vladimir Putin has acted like a brilliant chess player," Marshall Goldman emphasizes. "He had already written it all out during the middle of the 1990s when he was still in Saint Petersburg, far away from the presidency he now occupies. According to him, in order to restore his country's glory, it was necessary to use the energy weapon, to create national 'champions' like Gazprom. When he became president, he kept his promises. He implemented state capitalism and expelled corrupt executives from public and private companies." Yet, this strategy could still be undermined by flagrant underinvestment. According to the International Energy Agency, Russia could lack gas for export and to satisfy domestic demand as soon as 2010. A specialist in energy issues at the Russia/NIS unit of the French Institute for International Studies, Adrian Dellecker notes that Central Asia could still serve to mitigate that lack: "Kazakhstan is trying to maintain equidistance between China, the United States and Russia. But, in fact, Russia still controls the pipelines. Kazakh export options remain very limited." According to the researcher, although Russia does not have the technology for gas liquefaction necessary to exploit the big deposits in Siberia and even the Arctic, it could buy it: "The Russians want to succeed on their own. That's why they want to control the investments." Thus has Moscow dismissed Shell from the Sakhaline-2 gas deposit. But it allowed Total to participate in the exploitation of the Chtokman gas deposits.... Financially, Russia is solid. It prepaid a $15 billion debt to the Paris Club. As for the European Union, it skates along. It showed a common front at the Russian-European Samara summit last May. That surprised Putin, but the front has proven to be fragile. Shortly afterwards, the Russian president took up his pilgrim's staff to negotiate bilateral agreements with Austria, Greece, Belgium and Italy. -- -------------------------------------------------------- Posting archives: http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?lists=newslog http://groups.google.com/group/newslog/topics Escaping the Matrix website: http://escapingthematrix.org/ cyberjournal website: http://cyberjournal.org Achieving a Global Democratic Society: http://rkmvids.blogspot.com/2007/07/what-is-democracy.html Community Democracy Framework: http://cyberjournal.org/DemocracyFramework.html Moderator: •••@••.••• (comments welcome)