Yeltsin Makes a Move: From Russia With Love? : Whatever, the West must seize the opportunity

The Sarajevo artillery crisis is becoming the Cuban missile crisis of the 1990s. NATO has sworn that air strikes will follow if the Serb heavy artillery ringing the Bosnian capital is not removed by midnight Sunday and has backed up its words with the largest military preparations seen anywhere since the Gulf War. Meanwhile, Russia’s special envoy to Sarajevo has sworn that such air strikes will lead to “all-out war,” while back in Moscow President Boris N. Yeltsin’s principal rival, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, has spoken of “World War III.”

ENTER THE RUSSIANS: Uninvited, Russia has pledge 400 troops for Sarajevo. The United States has a leased naval base in Albania and 300 troops, not part of the NATO operation, in Macedonia. One Bosnian Serb military leader has sworn that if air strikes occur, all foreigners will be taken hostage.

U.N. officials have nervously welcomed the Russian move, which clearly caught them by surprise, and hopefully (or fearfully) reported Serb compliance with the ultimatum. But Secretary of State Warren Christopher sees only partial compliance, and Sarajevan Muslims fear a bluff.

The Russians may indeed be bluffing, but a more hopeful reading of the radically ambivalent Russian move is that Yeltsin, unable to bluff NATO, has decided--with a suddenness that might be unbelievable in anyone except this most mercurial of leaders--to join NATO in a South Slav police action. Like the Russians themselves, all of the combatants in the Balkans War are Slavs, but religion binds the Russians to the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and divides them from the Roman Catholic Croatians as well as from the religiously mixed but substantially Muslim Bosnians. In 19th and early 20th-Century Great Power struggles, Serbia sided with Russia, Croatia with Austro-Hungary, Bosnia with Turkey. Serbia remains a potent symbol for Yeltsin’s hyper-nationalistic foes.

Just possibly, Yeltsin has found a way to play the Serbian card his own way. If he can be seen at home to have rescued the Serbs from NATO, then even if he has also checked the Serbs’ expansionistic adventure, he will have foiled Zhirinovsky. If he is willing to replicate the Sarajevo solution, placing a Russian cordon sanitaire around other besieged Bosnian towns, he will be hailed as a savior.

Yeltsin may have realized how a Serbian victory could hurt him. The proposed partition of Bosnia would not just reward Serbian aggression, after all, but also inspire Russian neo-fascism. Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin’s foe, is the Russian equivalent of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s neo-fascist president. Zhirinovsky wants to defend the ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states by uniting them in a Greater Russia just as Milosevic has sought to unite the ethnic Serbs in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia. The trick, for Yeltsin, is to show that he can defend those ethnic Russians without being drawn into actions that would drag Russia down as surely as Milosevic’s actions have dragged Serbia down. The defense of the Serbs may be just the needed demonstration.

EXIT WITH PEACE?: But the implications are broader still. If NATO and Russia can stand together as a tacit alliance against ethnic aggression anywhere between the Atlantic and the Urals, no European ethnic group would benefit from this protection more than the scattered Russians themselves. The wars that may be averted elsewhere as East and West together impose peace in the Balkans are wars that Russians might otherwise have to fight.

The Bosnian Muslims, understandably, are ready to see nothing more in the arrival of Russian ground troops than the reinforcement of the Serbs now that the Serbs are on the defensive. They may well be right, but this moment of rapidly growing peril is also one of unparalleled opportunity. Yeltsin and the NATO leaders, including President Clinton, must help one another to seize it.