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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
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May 6, 2005
Bush is officially traveling to Russia to commemorate the 60th anniversary of VE Day, the Allied victory over the Nazis in World War II. His visit will include a dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the leader's summer residence, and stops in two nations that were part of the Soviet Union until its collapse: Latvia and Georgia. At his meeting with Putin, Bush is expected to address longstanding issues including counterterrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, and Moscow's munitions sales to Middle Eastern countries. Bush may also press Putin on what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called his excessive "consolidation of power." Russia, says Michael McFaul, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, "is the biggest setback to democracy that has happened on Bush's watch."
Strained, experts say. Putin's moves to consolidate the media, rein in Russia's governors, and jail businessmen like former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky fly in the face of the White House's global message to promote freedom and democracy. Washington is also concerned by Putin's interference in the election standoff in Ukraine, his continued efforts to control politics in Georgia and elsewhere in the former Soviet sphere of influence, and his decision to sell short-range missiles to Syria and nuclear equipment to Iran. From Russia's point of view, there is growing fear of what it views as American unilateralism, as evidenced by the war in Iraq, as well as policies it sees as aimed at curbing Russia's power, like NATO's expansion eastward into the Baltics. The Russians, simply put, "feel like Rodney Dangerfield," says Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. "No one gives them any respect."
Among them:
In his April 25 annual Address to the Federal Assembly, Putin lauded democratic values such as freedom, individual liberties, and intellectual diversity. But when confronted directly by Bush about democracy backsliding in a February summit in Bratislava, Slovakia, Putin did not answer directly. Democracy, he said, "should not be accompanied by the collapse of the state and the impoverishment of the people."
His meetings in Latvia with Baltic leaders, says Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist and author of Gulag: A History, are largely a symbolic gesture. For Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, the end of World War II marked not liberation, but the start of a Soviet occupation that lasted until 1991. As a result, Estonia and Lithuania are boycotting VE Day ceremonies in Moscow and want Putin to publicly condemn the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the secret prewar agreement that divided much of Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. Bush has publicly admonished Russia for its post-war occupation of the Baltics. "Bush is going to Latvia really to make [the Baltic people] feel better," Applebaum says.
The U.S. president's visit to Tbilisi, Georgia, his first to the Caucasus, is aimed at showing support for the recently elected, Western-leaning government of Mikhail Saakashvili. "It's kind of the exclamation point on the Rose Revolution [which occurred in Georgia in 2003]," says Robert Legvold, professor of political science at Columbia University. Russian-Georgian relations, never particularly strong to begin with, have soured in recent years. Georgians resent the fact that Russian troops are still stationed in Georgia, particularly in Abkhazia, a separatist region in northern Georgia. The Russians accuse the Georgian government of being soft on terrorism and not securing the Pankisi Gorge, a haven popular among Chechen rebels.
Bush's visit to Latvia and Georgia has upset the Russians, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took the unusual step of sending a formal letter of protest to Secretary Rice on the matter. Some Russians say they believe the United States manipulated the outcome of the so-called Orange and Rose revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia to turn them in the West's favor. The United States has said its intentions in the region are not to dislodge Russian influence, but rather to spread democratic freedoms.
The next former Soviet republic to take center stage in this struggle will likely be Belarus, which Secretary Rice called Europe's "last true dictatorship" during an April visit to Vilnius, Lithuania. She also urged Belarus' political opposition "that the time has come for change." Her remarks, echoed by President Bush in a May 5 interview with Lithuanian TV, rankled Foreign Minister Lavrov, who responded that democratic reform "cannot be imposed from outside."
There are many contentious issues, both foreign and domestic, affecting U.S.-Russian relations. Among them:
Experts say the personal friendship developed between Bush and Putin, much like the warm relations enjoyed between Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton, is important for reaching agreements and reducing tensions. "It's a huge asset," McFaul says. Moreover, the two countries have made important progress on a raft of critical issues, from sharing intelligence on terrorism, to fighting AIDS, to reducing nuclear arsenals.
Not much, experts say. "The only leverage we have is to make threatening noises," Goldman says. Still, there is a growing chorus in Congress to expel Russia from the Group of Eight--the elite club of industrialized democracies of which Russia is a fledgling member--unless it adheres to democratic norms and values. Others in Washington have suggested withholding U.S. support for Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization. "I think we have more leverage than we realize, but we're afraid to use it," says Sarah E. Mendelson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Russian and Eurasian Program.
Not likely, experts say. "First of all, because of the ceremonial nature of the event," McFaul says. "On the macro picture, there's really not an agenda with U.S.-Russian relations. They'll talk about nonproliferation and how we need to do more, faster, but that's a conversation we've been having for a decade.
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