Russia Intent on Showing West It’s Still a Power

When a contingent of Russian troops rolled into Kosovo over the weekend, the audacious maneuver capped a three-month campaign by Russia to maintain its place on the world stage in the face of NATO’s growing power.

First by mounting vitriolic protests against NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, then by launching a diplomatic effort to mediate the conflict and finally by sending in troops, Russia has demonstrated that it wants to be a player--no matter how sick its economy and its president.

“Russia wanted one very primitive and rather vain thing--to be in on it,” said Dmitry Y. Furman, a senior analyst with the Institute of Europe think tank. “Russia didn’t care so much about what was happening to Yugoslavia. It just couldn’t bear the thought that something could be decided in the world without Russia’s participation.”

The alliance’s bombing of Yugoslavia for 11 weeks demonstrated that Russia, even with its large stockpile of nuclear weapons, is no longer a superpower able to control the course of events beyond its borders.

By sending 200 soldiers into Kosovo, however, Russia jolted the West with a reminder of its military potential, boosted the spirits of ordinary Russians and gave its negotiators significantly greater leverage in talks over Russia’s role in the Kosovo peacekeeping effort. The U.S. signaled Sunday that Russia is now likely to win a greater role in peacekeeping operations.

“Russia had to demonstrate to the world that it was not ready to trail behind and be at the tail end of the largest peacekeeping operation in Europe since World War II,” said Russian army Gen. Makhmut A. Gareyev, president of the Academy of Military Sciences. “Russia showed that it was ready to compete with other countries.”

Determined to Make Diplomacy Work

Throughout the bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia had trouble winning international respect.

Suffering from an economic collapse to rival the Great Depression, Russia can barely feed its army even after major troop reductions. Russia’s entire federal budget for 1999 is less than 9% of what the Pentagon alone will spend this year. The country’s leaders have been reduced to begging for loans from the West.

Russia’s initial humiliation and anger over the NATO bombing evolved into a determination to halt the conflict through negotiation. In the end, Russia apparently concluded that its long-term ties with Washington were more important than backing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to the bitter end. The fact that Russia had signed on to the Kosovo peace plan left Milosevic little choice but to give in.

Despite the weakness of its bargaining position, Russia managed to eke out a few concessions from the alliance, including placing Kosovo peacekeeping forces under the sponsorship of the U.N., not NATO.

Russia also won praise from the West for its diplomatic efforts. President Boris N. Yeltsin, sidelined by poor health for much of the past three years, jokingly bragged late last week that President Clinton had called to thank him personally for Russia’s help in negotiating an end to the fighting.

“Yesterday, Clinton called late at night,” Yeltsin told Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov as the television cameras rolled. “Could you imagine--it turns out I am good, and I am diplomatic, and all kinds of good things, a jack-of-all-trades in general.”

The transformation of Russia’s stance from hostility to diplomacy is rooted largely in the country’s domestic political conflicts. The bombing of the Serbs, Russia’s Slavic allies, widened this country’s internal political rifts--and helped bring down the government of Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov.

Primakov was flying to Washington on March 23 when he received word that NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia was about to begin. In a defiant gesture, he ordered his plane turned around over the Atlantic and he returned to Moscow.

Over the next two weeks, the Primakov government mounted a verbal assault on NATO and hinted at the possibility of military action. Moscow broke off relations with NATO and ordered alliance officials in Russia to leave the country.

Hundreds of angry Russians demonstrated outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow; the protests reached a peak March 28 when a masked man tried to fire a grenade launcher at the embassy. Tension mounted as Russia ordered the naval reconnaissance ship Liman to sail for the Adriatic Sea off Yugoslavia.

In the days after the embassy attack, it became clear that the government’s harsh anti-American rhetoric was giving a boost to Yeltsin’s Communist opposition. Yeltsin, who had built his presidency on forging closer ties to the West, could gain nothing from a break in relations with the United States.

Russian military analysts said the West understood that Russia needed to vent its anger and knew that Moscow had no intention of taking military action.

“As long as Russia possesses nuclear warheads, it is allowed to pretend it is a superpower,” said Gennady N. Oreshkin, a retired Interior Ministry colonel. “Russia’s tough and uncompromising stance on the Kosovo conflict is nothing but a face-saving measure designed to help Russia avoid complete humiliation. It is a poor consolation, but this is all that Russia can count on in the current deplorable situation.”

On April 14, Yeltsin signaled that he would take a more moderate approach when he named former Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin special envoy to the Balkans.

Six days later, on the eve of NATO’s 50th birthday celebration in Washington, Chernomyrdin visited the presidents of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine. The three leaders were going to the NATO summit as invited nonmembers--Russia was staying away--and Chernomyrdin wanted them to deliver the word that Moscow was changing its course on Kosovo, said Revaz Adamiya, a Georgian parliamentary leader who went to the summit with Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

“This was the message: ‘Chernomyrdin is a reliable guy, and he is the main player in Russia’s establishment. Primakov is no longer a major figure,’ ” Adamiya recalled.

Two weeks later, Yeltsin fired Primakov. Although it was clear Yeltsin was jealous of Primakov’s growing political influence, his hawkish handling of the Kosovo crisis was also a factor, analysts said. During the next week, Yeltsin defeated an impeachment drive and installed Sergei V. Stepashin as his prime minister, securing a freer hand in dealing with Kosovo.

“Having won the battle at home and feeling safer about the rear, the Kremlin got an opportunity to take a more malleable, pro-Western--and less popular--position on the Yugoslavian crisis,” said Andrei V. Kortunov, an advisor to Chernomyrdin early in the negotiations.

Publicly, Russia continued to claim the high moral ground, insisting that NATO’s bombing was illegal under international law and demanding that it halt the airstrikes before negotiations began. But in closed-door meetings, Chernomyrdin tried to bridge the huge gap between NATO and Yugoslavia.

When Milosevic was indicted on war crimes charges May 27, Chernomyrdin traveled to Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, the next day and met with him for nine hours. The same day, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by Chernomyrdin threatening that Russia would withdraw from the negotiations if NATO didn’t make concessions.

Less than a week later, however, Chernomyrdin and Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari went to Belgrade and handed Milosevic a peace proposal that was not much different from what NATO had sought all along.

When Milosevic signaled his willingness June 3 to reach an agreement, it was hailed by some in the West as Serbia’s capitulation. But for the Russians, there was still more negotiating to be done.

Troop Movement Surprised West

Yeltsin sent in Ivanov, more of a hawk than Chernomyrdin, to close the deal with NATO. Ivanov insisted that Russia would not cast its vote for the peace plan at the U.N. Security Council until the bombs stopped falling. In the end, NATO ordered a pause in the bombing, and the Security Council quickly approved the peace plan.

Yeltsin was slow to endorse the peace deal but finally praised the efforts of Chernomyrdin and the others involved. “We have done our job,” the president said Friday.

Yet as Yeltsin was speaking, 200 Russian peacekeeping troops stationed in Bosnia-Herzegovina were on their way into Yugoslavia. The first foreign soldiers to enter the devastated country, they arrived before NATO and Russia had agreed on how the Kosovo peacekeeping force would be organized--and to whom the Russian forces would report.

It is unclear whether Yeltsin approved the incursion in advance, but it temporarily threw NATO leaders into disarray.

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and a group of NATO generals had left Moscow that morning after negotiations over how to deploy Russian troops broke down. Talbott and the generals quickly returned to the Russian capital to resume talks.

In Kosovo, Russia used its tiny force to the best advantage, taking over the airport of the province’s capital, Pristina, and boldly halting British and French NATO forces as they sought to move into the area. Russian officials explained that they were simply trying to make sure the peacekeeping operation was a U.N. mission as promised, and not just one for NATO forces.

By Sunday, Talbott appeared ready to concede Russia a greater role in the peacekeeping effort than NATO had originally wanted, saying, “Russia should have an area in which its responsibility is manifest.” And on Monday, Secretary of State Madeline Albright was smoothing over the differences, saying that “there has not been long-term damage” in U.S.-Russian relations because of Kosovo.

But not everyone was impressed with the army’s flamboyant gesture. Sergei N. Yushenkov, a liberal member of the Duma, said it made Russia look “ridiculous” and predicted that NATO would simply brush it aside.

“The Russian military is trying to show its fists after the fight is already over,” Yushenkov said. “It comes out more like a quarrel in a kindergarten after the toys have been divided.”