Andrei Polunin
The North Caucasus will not be a detonator
An emotion-laden interview Prime Minister Vladimir Putin gave to Russian and foreign journalists attending the international Valdai Discussion Club suggests some parallels between Russia's present confrontation with the West and the beginning of the First World War in 1914. In both cases the two sides discuss the same thing, but absolutely misunderstand each other. Will the North Caucasus detonate an explosion like the Balkans in 1914? We have asked political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, the founder of the National Strategy Institute, to answer this question while commenting on "hot" quotations from Mr Putin.
Vladimir Putin: "We have noticed the emergence of non-government organisations in some republics of the North Caucasus, which demanded separation citing the failure to defend South Ossetia. If we had not defended it, we would have suffered a second blow, one that would have upset the whole North Caucasus."
- Vladimir Putin overrates the role of non-government organisations in destabilising the situation, drawing his information from the reports of his staff who have made much of fighting a non-existent or a knowingly weak opponent in recent years. Numerous assistants and associates of Mr Putin and now Mr Medvedev have joined forces and are trying to sell their bosses the idea that non-government organisations are destructive, in the same way they tried in 2005-2007 to scare the Kremlin with the prospect of an "orange" revolution in Russia, which did not exist.
Vladimir Putin: "We had to respond. Were we expected to wipe our bleeding noses and bow our heads? Did you want us to wield a penknife?"
- Mr Putin is piqued that despite long years of efforts to establish relations with the West, despite a large number of pro-western steps he took between 2000 and 2004, the West has never acknowledged him as one of its own, has not made friends with him. Mr Putin's mistrust of the West dates from the "Orange" revolution in Ukraine: in 2004, he was assured that the US would not interfere in elections in Ukraine, but it did, or so he thought.
Now Mr Putin is trying to remind the West of his grievances, yet not to make a final break with it, but to come to terms with it by making the West accept part of the blame for cooling of relations.
Vladimir Putin: "How can the use of force be adequate when they use tanks, heavy artillery and multiple rocket launchers against us? Should we have retaliated with a slingshot? What did they expect? Nothing but a well-deserved punch in the face!"
- Putin is not a politician by nature, he is more of a businessman, and word manipulation has always irked him. It angers him that finely turned phrases often conceal double standards and even a wish to deceive. His rejoinder expressed his irritation with a sharp tone and was a call to the West to resume friendship and appreciate what Russia and the Kremlin have done for it in recent years.
And a lot has been done since Vladimir Putin came to office. Take the position on Cuba and Vietnam - Russia stressed it was not planning a military face-off on a global scale. Take the corridor granted to the US for a counter-terrorist operation in Afghanistan. Take the direct access provided for the US to CIS countries, which is within Russia's economic sphere of influence. Take a number of interesting investment projects in Russia offered to foreigners, Americans in particular.
Although tough-sounding imperial rhetoric has been adopted for home consumption ever since Mr Putin came to power, outwardly Russia has remained very loyal to the West in general and Washington in particular. It supported the West in key moments of history, and Putin is hurt that the West has failed to appreciate it.
But these efforts have really failed. For the West, Mr Putin remains a dark, hard-to-understand, non-transparent leader, one you cannot deal with in serious matters. Although the West has never regarded Mr Putin as an enemy, it has never seen him as a friend either. And this has hurt and irritated Mr Putin.
Vladimir Putin: "We have no imperial ambitions, nor will we ever have any, although some people are trying to accuse us of this."
- Mr Putin is telling the truth. He has never had imperial ambitions, nor does he have them now. Two factors have contributed to this misconception in recent years. The first was a PR campaign launched by the Kremlin for its own people and loaded with imperial rhetoric. The second was the West's self-imposed fear of Russia. After Islamic terrorism failed to qualify as the main enemy (it turned out to be depersonified, with no known headquarters and no known leadership), the West took a familiar enemy, Russia, out of mothballs and began cultivating a fear of Russia, using its imperial rhetoric as proof.
Despite all this, sober-minded analysts and observers have always felt that Russia has no imperial ambitions, and that Russia's irritation with the West was due to the West's failure to appreciate Russia's loyalty and readiness to help the West and the West's failure to make Russian leaders its own by integrating the Russian elite into the West's elite.
- Mr Belkovsky, let us try a sort of summary: can some parallels be drawn between the present Caucasian turmoil and 1914?
- Parallels exist, but they are not connected with the situation in the Caucasus. They show that the structural elements of the old world have outlived their usefulness. The world shaped at Yalta and Potsdam established after the Second World War is no more. It breathed its last breath in the early 1990s following the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. It is now absolutely clear that Yalta-era institutions, such as the UN and NATO, are not coping with crisis and are failing in their basic functions.
We are on the brink of a serious world redivision. But the conflict in Abkhazia and South Ossetia will not be its detonator. It is, as Putin said, of local significance and will not affect the global situation. A change of administration in the US and events around Iran and China will be more important.
