Russia Redirects Foreign Policy Sights Eastward

After more than a decade of whiplash-inducing swings in Russian foreign policy, says prominent Sinologist Mikhail L. Titarenko, this country’s trademark eagle finally has its heads on straight.

“The traditional crest of Russia is a two-headed eagle, but for the past few years both heads have been turned toward the West,” the director of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies says mockingly of the policies of former foreign ministers Andrei V. Kozyrev and Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

But since fellow Asia scholar and erstwhile intelligence chief Yevgeny M. Primakov took over the Foreign Ministry a mere two months ago, Titarenko adds, Russia has repaired damaged ties with China, put new emphasis on neglected relations with former Soviet republics, capitalized on its clout with rogue Middle East states and reemerged as a premier power in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The sudden swing from West to East in foreign policy priorities apparently also is turning human heads in this country.

To the extent that Russia’s role on the world stage is an election-year issue, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has stolen his opponents’ thunder and removed just about every contentious international issue from the resurgent Communist Party’s campaign agenda.

While Yeltsin is still subject to savaging by his rivals on this country’s myriad domestic woes, his popularity has swelled measurably with the foreign policy sea change.

Opinion polls--which are not always accurate but reliably reflect trends--show that Yeltsin’s approval ratings have climbed out of the single-digit percentages in the past month, and few observers see any domestic achievements that would justify that change.

On the other hand, Yeltsin has deftly parried Communist criticism of his handling of international relations by sacking Kozyrev and replacing him with Primakov, a Soviet-era academic untarnished by previous political alliance and a figure largely acceptable in the nationalist and Communist camps.

Though regarded with suspicion in Western Europe and the United States because of his long-standing ties with outlaw nations such as Iran and Iraq, the 66-year-old scholar-turned-spymaster-turned-diplomat collects mostly accolades among Russians.

Ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky applauded Primakov’s appointment in January as a sign the Kremlin was reorienting its affairs toward traditional allies. Even Communist politicians posturing ahead of the June 16 presidential election grudgingly concede that they have little to complain about in the sphere of Russia’s foreign relations.

“I wouldn’t say that Mr. Primakov has significantly changed the direction of our foreign affairs,” says Gennady N. Seleznyov, a former editor of the Communist-era party organ Pravda and now chairman of the lower house of parliament, the Duma. “But that he better represents the interests of Russia than did ‘Mr. Da’ is obvious.”

Seleznyov was alluding to Kozyrev, so dubbed for his pro-Western views and congenial nature that made him the antithesis of the late, longtime Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, known during the Cold War as “Mr. Nyet.”

Asian affairs analysts such as Vitaly V. Naumkin, director of the Institute for Oriental Studies, once run by Primakov, contend that the shift in emphasis from West to East is motivated by pragmatism rather than electioneering.

“Russian foreign policy needed to be made more assertive and more relevant to this country’s national interests,” says Naumkin. “But nothing has really taken place that should be regarded as aggressive or hard-line.”

Titarenko agrees, describing the recent realignment as a “long-overdue balancing that should not be interpreted as any kind of demotion of the importance of ties with the West.”

Quite the contrary, the analysts note, Russia has executed its turn to the East at the same time it earned membership in the Council of Europe, secured more than $10 billion in loans from the International Monetary Fund and drew pledges of support and confidence from Western leaders such as President Clinton and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

In contrast with the tense situation that prevailed six months ago, relations between Moscow and Washington have actually settled into a mostly stable pattern.

Russia remains vehemently opposed to any eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include countries on its borders. But a cooperative deployment of Russian troops along with NATO forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina apparently has pushed that most contentious of issues onto a back burner.

Washington has quietly agreed to wait until both U.S. and Russian presidential elections are over to make any decisions regarding NATO expansion, Western diplomats explain.

That concession has come in exchange for Russia’s toning down of the rhetoric that provoked public hysteria over NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serbs last summer, when those considered in the West to have instigated the Balkans bloodshed were being cast by Russian politicians as innocent victims of senseless NATO aggression.

Yeltsin on Thursday repeated his frequent warnings that NATO expansion could provoke new tensions in the Russian-U.S. relationship.

However, the true state of Russia’s relations with the West is far from bleak. The Group of Seven wealthy industrial nations is convening in Moscow on April 19-20 for a nuclear security summit that promises to boost Yeltsin’s prestige and his reelection chances.

As for Primakov, he has been the beneficiary in the public’s minds here of efforts to ease East-West tensions that actually began long before Kozyrev’s departure, Naumkin notes.

“The policy began changing even before Primakov, but a personality change was needed to make the public believe it,” he observes. “Yeltsin has managed to neutralize his foreign policy critics while changing nothing in relations with the West, except perhaps their appearance.”

Primakov has made clear from the start that he regards as his top priority the state of relations with the “near abroad,” Moscow’s distinctive reference to the newly independent republics of the former Soviet Union.

His noticeable focus on Russia’s neighbors and expressed concern for the plight of 25 million ethnic Russians living in what are now foreign countries have established him as a loyal champion of national interests and allowed Yeltsin to exploit a populist gesture by the Duma--its March 15 vote to revoke the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

That vote drew vehement denunciations from leaders of former Soviet republics from Armenia to the Baltics, but other republics welcomed a tightening of ties. On Saturday, Russia and Belarus agreed to pursue a treaty that would bind the two nations closer while preserving their independence.

“It is no coincidence that Mr. Primakov’s first trips were not to the United States or Western Europe but to Ukraine, Byelorussia [Belarus], Kazakhstan--in our own neighborhood,” observes Viktor I. Borisyuk, a foreign policy analyst at the USA-Canada Institute.

Yeltsin and his diplomats have concentrated in recent months on: resolving old boundary disputes with China; working on territorial and military concerns with Ukraine; mediating conflicts in other former republics--like the Georgia-Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh disputes; and stepping up joint patrols with Tajik soldiers in the volatile mountain territory abutting Afghanistan.

Over the weekend, Yeltsin sent a message of support for Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, who faces U.N. sanctions for failing to hand over two suspects in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, the Libyan news agency Jana reported.

In an interview with the daily Izvestia earlier this month, Primakov noted that the next priority is restoring ties with the countries Russia once dominated in Eastern Europe. He has since traveled to Slovakia and Poland.

Analysts say this reorientation has tangible consequences for Russian security. “These are the kinds of priorities that are necessary and correct for Russia,” Titarenko says of the eastward focus. “People want to feel more secure in their own country, and that means attending first to those threats and issues along our border.”