Fledgling Democracies

*Russia upped the ante this week in the stare-down with Georgia by sending additional troops to Abkhazia. Here, the Chicago Tribune has the back story and an analysis of Russia’s geopolitical aims in the conflict.

*Voice of America chats with Depty Asst Sec of State David Merkel, who says that Russia would do well to take a more “hands-off” approach to the former Soviet states.

• On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko urged Russia not to set aside the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, a key treaty setting out relations between the two countries. Russia’s parliament suggested voiding the agreement in retaliation for Ukraine’s EU and NATO ambitions. See the EU Business story here.

• Kazakstan, home to 3.3 percent of the world’s oil reserves, announced that its economy’s growth will slow in 2009, to 6 percent or less after seven years with and average growth of 10 percent thanks to the skyrocketing price of oil. A hefty supply of oil will not be enough to ward off the ill effects of the credit crunch, says this Kazinform story.

In news related to an earlier post, the lawyer for the NGO head who won a constitutional court showdown this week was attacked late Thursday, RIA Novosti reports. Skinheads allegedly beat the attorney on the head repeatedly with wooden sticks, and one attacker said he had “a mission to kill the lawyer.”

The “smuggling” case against Aslamazyan had press freedom significance - the NGO she ran trained broadcast journalists and more than 2,000 Russian journalists had directed a letter protesting her arrest to former president Putin her arrest prompted more than 2,000 Russian journalists to send an open letter of protest to former-president Vladimir Putin.

So a Russian by the name of Dima Bilan won the recent Eurovision song contest, a sort of multinational version of American Idol. On the news that votes from the Baltic states helped Bilan claim the title, a young pro-Kremlin assemblage gathered outside the Latvian and Estonian embassies in Moscow to express their gratitude.

They even released a statement which read, in part: “It’s very pleasant to hear that Russia was supported in this contest by our nearest neighbours, including the Baltic states, with whom our bilateral relations aren’t very good.”

Just so you’re clear on how big this show is: Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev made a telephone call while on his first official foreign trip (to China) to congratulate Bilan, who’s win guarantees next year’s contest will be hosted by Russia. The former President/current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin referred to the win as “yet another triumph for all of Russia.” If ever anyone was all about triumph…

Take that, Western Europe.

A case highlighting the crackdown by Russian authorities on NGOs with Western ties was decided today in favor of Manana Aslamaziyan, former head of an organization that helped train journalists and which was funded largely by U.S. sources.

Aslamaziyan had been charged with smuggling after failing to declare cash worth about $12,400 as she passed through Sheremetyevo airport in January of 2007. In the months following her arrest, her NGO was raided by police, its bank accounts were frozen and a new charge of tax evasion was brought against Aslamaziyan, who fled to Paris.

But today’s decision found the smuggling charge to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that the government’s definition of “large sums of money” was simply too vague. Reason to be cautiously optimistic? Aslamaziyan’s lawyer thinks so. Viktor Parshutkin, Aslamazyan’s lawyer, called Tuesday’s decision a “good omen” for the Russian legal system. He’s quoted in The Moscow Times story:

“This decision has made me very happy,” he said by telephone from St. Petersburg. “[The Constitutional Court] has demonstrated its independence from the political machinations of the authorities.”

In a speech at the University of Denver today, John McCain spoke of his willingness to work with Russia towards crafting legally binding limits on nuclear weapons. Such an accord would replace START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which expires in 2009.

The New York Times called the speech a sign of McCain’s efforts to distance his own policies from those of President Bush, who has been unwilling to enter into such agreements. But the same story also mentioned McCain’s proposed expulsion of Russia from the Group of Eight industrialized countries* (other members: Great Britain, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and Italy), and questioned the subsequent likelihood of Moscow’s interest in bargaining with a President McCain.

*See why Nina Hachigian, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, thinks McCain’s proposal is a terrible one.

So say Russian nationalists, who are doing what they can to reverse the 1954 transfer of ownership of the Crimean Peninsula from the USSR to, well the other USSR (Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic).

With Ukraine aching for NATO membership, and Russia doing their best to thwart it, this dust-up centers around a naval base in the Ukrainian coastal town of Sevastopol. Vladimir Putin has nightmares of the strategic base falling under NATO command should Ukraine succeed in joining.

The (Scottish) Sunday Herald has all the he said, he said here.

Also see this post on the same topic, from a blog called Windows to Russia.

The new Russian president is in China, where talks are expected to center around trade. His predecessor is credited with strengthening ties with China, though plenty of tensions still exist. According to Bloomberg, Medvedev hopes to persuade China to buy more than just energy from his country.

Medvedev also touched down in Kazakhstan en route; on the agenda there was a request that the country continue exporting its oil via pipelines through Russia.

All in all, the trip underscores the new global strategy game major players are part of: the struggle for control of energy supplies and growing resistance against Western dominance.

Medvedev’s first Western trip is set for early June when he’ll meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany.

The Snow Leopard, in this case, signifies South Ossetia, about which Joshua Kucera writes in Slate’s feature called Dispatches: Notes From Different Corners of the World. So far, Kucera has posted four installments in a series on the former Soviet Union, and they prove a really fascinating glimpse into the world of shoddy spies, propaganda and other facets of life in South Ossetia, Azerbaijan and beyond.

Yesterday I posed several questions to James Goldgeier, a Russia - U.S. relations expert and professor of political science and international politics at George Washington University. James is also Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He’s written extensively on international relations and has co-authored several books, including Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War and America Between the Wars: from 11/9 to 9/11.

Click below for audio.
James Goldgeier audio

Interview Transcript:

Jim Goldgeier is professor of political science and international politics at George Washington University and he’s also Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. I asked Jim how Russia has managed to make itself an international presence again, and just how much of that has to do, in large part, with the posturing of the Putin administration.

Well I think President Putin was very successful in recasting the situation, making a claim for Russia’s position in world affairs. Now he was certainly helped dramatically by the huge rise in energy prices. That has made a huge difference, you know, when Boris Yeltsin was president of Russia the price of oil was $11 a barrel.

Unfortunately for Russia, there’s still huge potential question marks: this is not the Soviet Union again, it doesn’t have an ideology that people worldwide are interested in, it doesn’t have a military that can project very far, it has severe demographic problems. So there are lots of reasons why Russia isn’t as much of a major power as it might look given the optics that have been created by President Putin.

Is it safe to say that perhaps the most volatile situation for Russia at the moment is the conflict with Georgia?

Yeah, the Russia-Georgia situation is very dangerous, and you have two regions within Georgia that are part of what are called, in that part of the world, frozen conflicts, that is conflicts that aren’t resolved, two secessionist regions that Georgia does not want to see become independent. It’s not clear what Russia really wants other than to maintain conflict there as a way of undermining the Georgian government, and it’s all caught up now in the question of whether or not Georgia can move on the path of an increasingly Westward orientation at least with respect, for example, to joining NATO.

What do you expect US-Russia relations to look like under new administrations in both countries?

You know a lot I think depends on who the new president of the U.S. is. Certainly John McCain’s rhetoric about Russia is quite dramatic. John McCain really has been talking about his antipathy for the authoritarianism that has developed in Russia. John McCain, for example, has suggested that Russia should be kicked out of the G8 group of eight advanced countries. We don’t really know too much about President Obama’s strategies regarding Russia, you know, if he were president. I think, probably as a democratic president, he would have to take some stance on the questions of human rights and democracy in Russia so at the end of the day, perhaps a McCain or an Obama wouldn’t be that far apart as president.

Do you expect the new president, Medvedev, will have any real autonomy with Putin as prime minister? To what extent is he likely to defer to Putin?

Well we don’t know yet. It’s a very bizarre setup; having these two at the top. It doesn’t seem like it would be very stable for very long. You really do need one leader. I think we have to go on the assumption that Putin is still the leader. I mean he created Medvedev and put Medvedev in this presidency, and I think until we see otherwise we have to assume Putin is still calling the shots in Russia.

And finally, the very restrictive law passed in 2006 to regulate NGOs in the country, what effect has that had?

Well the big fear within Russia, especially after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine back in 2004, was you know could something like that happen in Russia, could you have people, sort of civil society out on the streets protesting the rigging of an election and the Russian government since the Orange Revolution has tried to do everything it can to make sure that you wouldn’t have that kind of scenario within Russia.

You know, one of the arguments Russia made was that it was external involvement in Ukraine that had helped promote the development of Ukrainian civil society and I think that you know, it has had a chilling effect. There are still outside western organizations that operate within Russia and I think we’ll continue to see that but everybody knows that the political space is much more constricted and contracted than it was certainly in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin when Western groups were welcomed within Russia.

Thanks so much for taking these questions, you’ve been really helpful.

Good, great to talk with you.

What’s a world leader without a video crush? Though I’d hate to think somewhere a McCain girl is hard at work on her YouTube submission.