December 7, 2004
By Pavel Felgenhauer
Moscow Times
The situation in Ukraine is developing badly for the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin officially congratulated presidential hopeful Victor Yanukovych several times, but the Ukrainian Supreme Court declared his victory invalid. Putin insisted that a new presidential election in Ukraine would be illegal and senseless, while the EU stressed that a runoff was necessary. Hours after Putin's statement, a new election was officially announced in Kiev.
Russia is isolated and humiliated. The elite and the public believe the so-called Orange Revolution in Kiev is a strategic Russian defeat, and anti-Western tempers are rising. Putin and his Kremlin cohorts feel themselves at risk.
A well-known Moscow political expert and Kremlin adviser worked with other so-called "political technologists" in Kiev to help promote Yanukovych to the presidency. After widespread falsification of the results of the second round caused mass protests in Kiev, the technologists returned to Moscow to be debriefed in the Kremlin. Last week at a closed seminar in Moscow, this expert spelled out the response inside the Kremlin to the events in Ukraine: "Everyone in the Kremlin believes that a typical American special operation for regime change was carried out in Ukraine. This special operation was sanctioned and supported by agents of the EU and the OSCE. We will not 'integrate' with such European institutions in the future and will not share common values with them, because Russia does not want to follow the path of Georgia and Ukraine and experience Western-organized regime change. The opinion of the Kremlin is that the events in Ukraine have provoked the worst Russian-Western crisis of Putin's tenure. Putin will not forgive the Western takeover of Ukraine. Why should we introduce European values and standards of democracy? Europe is developing more slowly than the United States or China. Maybe we need American or, even better, Chinese values and standards."
The expert made it clear that the Chinese method of public televised executions of wrongdoers by a bullet to the head is believed by many in the Kremlin to be an effective technique that could help control corruption and other anti-state activities that threaten Putin's cherished "vertical of executive power."
Last week, after briefly meeting outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma near Moscow, Putin visited India and delivered a prepared policy speech in New Delhi that seems to confirm that the events in Ukraine have indeed initiated a serious foreign policy shift. Putin publicly restated former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov's idea (first expressed in 1998) of a strategic alliance between Russia, India and China as the foundation of a "multipolar world" -- a worldwide alliance that would curb the American superpower. Rebuked by the West in Ukraine, Putin seems to be turning East.
"We see attempts to remodel the God-given diversity of modern civilization in accordance with the barrack-like principles of a unipolar world as highly dangerous," Putin stated. In his speech, Putin accused the supporters of a unipolar world -- otherwise known as the United States -- of promoting social and economic inequality, global terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, numerous regional conflicts and so on. Dictatorship in international affairs, "even if it's overlaid with nice pseudo-democratic rhetoric," will make all these problems worse, he said.
Referring to the situation in Iraq, Putin spoke of "Iraqi resistance forces fighting occupying troops." In New Delhi, Putin sounded like a radical anti-globalist protester rather than a G8 member and U.S. President George W. Bush's buddy-apparent.
Will Putin's combatant mood persist? The idea of an anti-Western alliance with India and China will surely fail, as it did when Primakov first announced it. India spends billions of dollars on modern Russian weapons to arm itself against China and recently formed a close strategic partnership with the United States. China is in no mood at present to seek a quarrel with the world's single superpower just because Putin got his fingers burned in Ukraine.
Russia's isolation and enduring political and military weakness will ensure that our dislike and distrust of the West will produce more words than genuine actions. The constant Kremlin double-dealing of trying to be with the West and against it at the same time will continue.
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst based in Moscow.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/12/07/007.html