Last Tuesday, the day after the Munich Conference, Russia's representative to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, called a press conference to express his views on the "resetting" of Russian-American relations heralded in Munich by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. The Russian representative said he was very pleased that Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili, who attended the forum, had not been given the floor.
Mr Rogozin interpreted this as "an apology for all the unpardonable things that had been said [about Russia] after it repelled the aggression against South Ossetia". The ice in the relations is thawing, Mr Rogozin said, adding, "We cannot pretend that everything is ancient history or that everything has been forgotten". For the second time in the last three years, the Munich Security Conference provides a rostrum from which the start of a new era in the relations between Russia and the West is proclaimed. In 2007 Vladimir Putin's tough Munich speech was seen as a declaration of a "cool" war. This year, Mr Biden played the role of herald. The speech by Vice Premier Sergey Ivanov, who represented Russia, was studied and friendly.
A flurry of activity ensued. Moscow played host to a party of American officials led by Under Secretary of State William Burns last week. The content of the notion of "reset", however, is still unclear. So far, strategic arms reduction is the only topic on which the two sides are ready to meet each other halfway.
The issue diverts Russian-American relations into the virtual reality of nuclear arsenals that no one is ever going to use. Even so, it can break the deadlock in Russian-American relations, experts say: at least they will move on from interminable bickering to dialogue, at which point really hot topics could be tackled, such as NATO expansion and the deployment of missile defense systems close to the Russian borders.
TALKING PERSONALITIES
The mood at the Russian Foreign Ministry is upbeat: "Everybody was fed up with Bush. It was impossible to work with him because his position had no flexibility," a source at the Ministry said. However, in spite of the high expectations the situation at the Foreign Ministry is uncertain; of course, Mr Biden had declared a "reset", but no instructions have yet been handed down from the Kremlin. The Foreign Ministry looks forward to the Obama-Medvedev meeting to clear things up. William Burns has already confirmed that the summit will take place in April.
Moscow and Washington indeed will have to start from scratch, determine who will negotiate with whom, and pick someone in the U.S. Administration with whom Vladimir Putin can agree to do business. No wonder Henry Kissinger, the architect of the 1970s détente, has been playing the role of broker. The Kremlin and the White House are looking at new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with some suspicion. Mr Putin considers Vice President Biden to be an acceptable negotiating partner, sources in Moscow suggest. Moreover, the American press reports that Mr Biden is eager to deal with Russian affairs.
Washington is aware that Vladimir Putin, and not President Medvedev, has the final say, experts say, but Mr Obama cannot deal with the Prime Minister directly. Furthermore, in general he is against the personification of relations, says Vladimir Frolov, President of the LEFF Group analytical centre: "The ‘Clinton-was-friends-with-Yeltsin, Bush-was-friends-with-Putin' approach is thought to have failed."
Helping President Obama build relations without getting personal will be people who have worked in Moscow in the past. Michael McFaul worked at the Carnegie Moscow Centre for two years and is now in charge of Russian affairs at the National Security Council. Mr McFaul was in Moscow last week. Former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William Burns was Under Secretary of State under Bush and has kept the job under Obama. He is in with the Russian establishment, while McFaul was very critical of Putin until he joined the civil service, a fact that Moscow will remember, experts believe.
There is no doubt that the Under Secretary for Arms Control will be another "Muscovite", Rose Gottemoeller, who headed up the Carnegie Moscow Centre before Obama's election. This sends a clear signal to Moscow that the Americans are serious about seeking a breakthrough at least on the nuclear arms reduction issue.
DISARMAMENT IN EXCHANGE FOR MISSILE DEFENSE
Nuclear disarmament, says expert Frolov, is an uncontroversial topic on which progress is easiest to achieve, and that in turn would help to solve other problems. "It immediately creates an atmosphere of détente and a warming of relations," he explains. Nuclear negotiations will help to create more informal channels of communications and put aside the more acute issues, and Maria Lipman of the Carnegie Centre adds, "One can roll out excessive demands and then spend years discussing the number of warheads, assuming that it is such an important issue for the Americans that they would turn a blind eye on other things, like the murder of journalists, in order to see the negotiations continued".
One must act swiftly. The START-1 Treaty expires in December. Talk of a new treaty started back in 2007 after Putin and Bush went fishing together in Kennebunkport, but there was no follow-up. On the eve of the New Year, when the final consultations on the topic were held in Moscow, the Russians went through the motions of talking to the Americans as they waited for the inauguration of Obama, Newsweek's source at the Foreign Ministry says. Sources at the Foreign Ministry confirm that the process will be dragged out: "We will probably sign an interim agreement before working on a new treaty." In the opinion of Vladimir Yevseyev, a military expert at the RAS Institute of International Economics and International Relations (IMEMO), the work might take four years.
The first of two stumbling blocks in such negotiations has always been the verification system. "START-1 envisages very close and frequent bilateral verifications," Mr Yevseyev says. Everybody realized that the system of verifications geared to the times of the Cold War was outdated and the Americans wanted to simplify it. However, after the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2001, Russia began to resist it, although it staged far fewer inspections than the Americans.
The second problem is what is to be reduced. Russia wants strategic carriers to be reduced, a view that is not favourable to the Americans. Russia destroys its warheads while America stores them up, Mr Yevseyev explains. It means that they can put them back, something Russia cannot agree with. But these are details and Moscow appears to be ready to negotiate. The difficulty lies in the fact that the Deputy Head of the Government's staff and former Ambassador to the U.S. Yuri Ushakov and current Ambassador Sergei Kislyak will link the strategic arms limitation talks with the much more controversial issue of missile defense. Mr Kislyak and Mr Ushakov today play the key role in dealing with the Americans. "Kislyak's position is to stand pat," says a source close to the Government. "one can get bogged down in the bargaining. It is a great risk." "To demand that the U.S. scrap missile defense in Europe is a patently losing negotiating stance," echoes Mr Yevseyev.
MISSILE DEFENSE IN EXCHANGE FOR IRAN
The U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in December 2001 was the first affront Bush delivered to Putin, who had backed America after the terrorist attacks on September 11. The decision to deploy elements of missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland was the last straw: Moscow was now convinced of Washington's hostile intentions.
The Kremlin can hope, with some grounds, that the U.S. may soften its position on missile defense. Obama's overall approach is known: to question everything the previous administration did. Mr Biden said in Munich that the U.S. would continue to deploy missile systems, but in consultation with Russia. Dmitry Rogozin interpreted this statement as a hint that the new Administration does not take missile defense in its present form for granted. However, on the eve of the Munich Conference, Washington signaled to Poland and the Czech Republic that the former agreements would remain in force. This was also the impression that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk gathered from his meeting with Mr Biden in Munich.
Michael Levi, an analyst with the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, says that the Americans are unlikely to shut down the missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic so as not to antagonize them. "However, the process is likely to be slowed down and Russia will at least be listened to, something that Bush never did," Mr Levi added.
The fact of the matter is that the Americans have not yet decided what to do with missile defense. They now link the problem directly with Russia's stand on Iran. "If we can liquidate that threat... together with Russia we might take another look at missile defense," William Burns told Interfax on Thursday. On the face of it, there is some logic there: the Americans have always said that the missile defense would be targeting Iranian missiles. Russia sees missile defense is a threat. The Russian position on the Iranian threat has always been fairly ambivalent. Iranian missiles cannot yet reach Washington, but they can easily reach the Russian border. Russia's only division of Iskander missiles, which the Kremlin recently threatened to deploy in the Kaliningrad Region, is based near Astrakhan, close to Iran. Moscow cannot afford to put pressure on Tehran, but it can support the American initiatives at the UN Security Council.
SHOW THEM A FINGER AND THEY WILL BITE OFF YOUR HAND
Finally, the most conflict-prone topic is the CIS. "On that issue there is no dialogue, because Moscow believes that any discussion amounts to yielding ground," says expert Frolov. Even if Moscow and Washington proceed to sort out the tangle of contradictions - from disarmament to missile defense and Iran - any unexpected development in the post-Soviet space could easily annul the results of all the efforts.
After the war in Georgia, President Medvedev declared unequivocally that Russia had its zone of national interests. He meant the CIS. In Munich, Joe Biden and then-European Union Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana said they did not recognize any spheres of influence. In reality, however, the West has been softening its position since Bush's departure. William Burns confirmed in Moscow that the U.S. no longer insisted on an early admission of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
Europe recognized even during the Bush presidency that Russia has a zone of interests along its border. "Politicians are aware that if, for example, you want to deal with the Central Asian states, you have to deal with Russia," says Stefan Meister, an expert with the German Council on Foreign Relations.
A source at the Foreign Ministry says this should be the message sent to Americans by Kyrgyzstan's decision to shut down the American base at Manas. Washington is still trying to persuade Bishkek to review its decision, but the Kremlin is adamant. There are grounds for believing that any attempt by President Kurbanbek Bakiev to backtrack would be perceived as betrayal.
The confrontation between Moscow and Washington in the CIS space is marked by what Maria Lipman of the Carnegie Centre describes as "profound mistrust of the Americans who, if you show them a finger, will bite off your hand". There is a thaw in the relations between the two countries, but a thaw is not always a harbinger of spring: last summer Russia and America were already getting set for a détente and the war in Georgia broke out.
Leonid Fishman