by Mark N. Katz
Two storylines about Saudi-Russian relations have recently dominated the airwaves. One is that Moscow and Riyadh are sharply divided by several issues: not only Syria and Iran, but also Crimea and the Russian belief that the Saudis are supporting Muslim opposition inside Russia. The other is that Saudi [...]]]>
by Mark N. Katz
Two storylines about Saudi-Russian relations have recently dominated the airwaves. One is that Moscow and Riyadh are sharply divided by several issues: not only Syria and Iran, but also Crimea and the Russian belief that the Saudis are supporting Muslim opposition inside Russia. The other is that Saudi Arabia is about to buy $2-4 billion (reports vary) worth of Russian arms for Egypt.
It seemed unlikely to me that both these reports could be true. If Moscow and Riyadh can’t see eye to eye on issues of mutual concern, then their relationship is bad and the Kingdom would not buy such a large amount of weaponry for Egypt from Russia. On the other hand, if the Saudis do indeed intend to buy billions of dollars in Russian arms for Cairo, then clearly Saudi-Russian relations must not be as bad as has been reported. The question, then, is: what’s the true story?
A visit to Moscow last week convinced me that both storylines are indeed true. Seasoned Russian Middle East watchers I spoke to indicated that Saudi-Russian relations really are very poor. In 2013, Prince Bandar bin Sultan (who was then the Saudi intelligence chief) met twice with President Vladimir Putin to try to persuade him to end Moscow’s support for the Assad regime in Syria. The prince reportedly offered several inducements, including billions in arms purchases for the Saudi military and billions more in Saudi investments in Russia. Putin, however, rejected these offers.
The Saudis, one Russian source indicated, seemed to think that Moscow would change its policy on Syria if it were offered enough money. But for Putin, Syria is a Russian domestic political issue. To be seen as ending support for a long-time ally such as Assad would undermine Putin inside Russia. Thus, the Russian president refused Bandar’s offers.
Crimea’s secession from Ukraine only served to further worsen Saudi-Russian relations. Riyadh’s expression of concern over Russia’s treatment of the Muslim Crimean Tatar population has only fed Russian fears that the Kingdom wants to foment Muslim unrest inside Russia. The Saudi-Russian relationship, then, is indeed poor.
That said, Russian observers are convinced that Riyadh will make a large-scale arms purchase from Russia for Egypt. Riyadh strongly backs the Egyptian military leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (who was just elected president), and is extremely unhappy that Washington does not . After the Obama administration cut back American arms supplies to the Egyptian government for cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood (which el-Sisi ousted from power last summer), Riyadh became determined to find another supplier. Russia happens to be the arms producer that can most readily fulfill this need. Riyadh’s buying Russian arms for Cairo, then, is more a sign of Saudi annoyance with Washington and has no implication for improving Saudi-Russian relations more broadly.
Indeed, according to one source, receiving Russian arms will not even serve to greatly improve Russian-Egyptian relations. Egyptian army officers prefer to work with the US, and do not want to go back to working with Russia as their predecessors did from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s (the Egyptian Army officers I spoke to confirmed this). Egypt’s Saudi benefactors would also support the officers’ position.
A development that could serve to improve Saudi-Russian relations, one Russian observer noted, is the very recent trend toward improved Saudi-Iranian relations. One Saudi grievance against Russia is that it has close ties to Riyadh’s rivals in Tehran. But if Saudi-Iranian (as well as US-Iranian) relations improve, then Riyadh will have less reason to resent the Russian-Iranian relationship. Of course, even if Saudi-Iranian bilateral relations improve, the countries are likely to remain at loggerheads over Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Bahrain. With Moscow continuing to support or sympathize with the actors Tehran is backing in the first three of these states, the prospects for improved Saudi-Iranian relations, and improved Saudi-Russian relations, are limited.
Thus, just as the poor state of Saudi-Russian relations will not prevent Riyadh from buying Russian arms for Cairo, even large-scale Saudi purchases of Russian arms for Egypt will not lead to any appreciable improvement in ties between Moscow and Riyadh.
Photo: Prince Bandar bin Sultan (R), and then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin enter a hall for a signing ceremony in Moscow July 14, 2008. Credit: RUSSIA/RIA NOVOSTI/ALEXEI DRUZHININ
]]>by Derek Davison
This Monday marked the end of a five-day conference (May 15-19) in Kiev, called “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” organized by The New Republic and specifically its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. The conference press release promised that “an international group of intellectuals will come to Kiev to meet Ukrainian counterparts, [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
This Monday marked the end of a five-day conference (May 15-19) in Kiev, called “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” organized by The New Republic and specifically its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. The conference press release promised that “an international group of intellectuals will come to Kiev to meet Ukrainian counterparts, demonstrate solidarity, and carry out a public discussion about the meaning of Ukrainian pluralism for the future of Europe, Russia, and the world.” However, Wieseltier’s remarks at the conference, delivered on May 17, focused very little on “Ukrainian pluralism” and instead painted a picture of a crisis that bears little resemblance to what we actually know about the situation in Ukraine.
Wieseltier should be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the neoconservative policy world. Despite being considered a liberal thinker, he has worked on behalf of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and its offshoot, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), as well as continues to be affiliated with PNAC’s successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). FPI has written many letters, all including Wieseltier’s signature, to prominent DC politicians, endorsing a litany of neocon policy goals: military intervention in Syria, increased hostility toward Iran, and belligerence toward Russia. Wieseltier himself insists that he is not a neocon, and former LobeLog contributor Ali Gharib once declared him a “liberal neocon enabler and booster” rather than a neocon in his own right. This may be a distinction without much of a difference.
During his remarks in Kiev, Wieseltier began by placing his feelings on the situation in Ukraine in the context of his “somewhat facile but nonetheless sincere regret at having been born too late to participate in the struggle of Western intellectuals, some of whom became my teachers and my heroes, against the Stalinist assault on democracy in Europe.” That desire seems to have motivated Wieseltier to concoct a new narrative of recent events that papers over the very real internal struggle going on among the Ukrainians themselves, in order to make the crisis entirely about Russian aggression. He concedes that “Putin is not Stalin,” at least, and no one could challenge his assertion that “Putin is bad enough,” but Wieseltier was still trading in half-truths through much of his speech.
For starters, Wieseltier opines that “[t]he Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West, its unintimidated preference for Europe over Russia, is not merely a strategic and economic choice; it is also a moral choice, a philosophical choice, a societal decision about ideals, a defiance of power in the name of justice, a stirring aspiration to build a society and a state that is representative of some values and not others.” This assumes facts not in evidence — specifically, of a “Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West.” According to polling data, prior to Crimea’s secession in March, when Ukrainians were asked which economic union their country should join if it could only join one, support for joining the European Union never polled higher than a slim plurality of Ukrainian citizens. A Gallup poll taken in June-July 2013 found that more Ukrainians saw NATO as a “threat” than as “protection” (a plurality chose “neither”). Predictably, Ukrainians in the country’s east have been more likely to have a negative view of NATO and the EU than Ukrainians in the west.
Even now, after Crimea’s secession and the implied threats of a Russian invasion, only 43% of Ukrainians want stronger relations with the EU to the exclusion of stronger relations with Russia, and only 45% of Ukrainians have a positive view of the EU’s influence on Ukraine. These are both pluralities, yes, but they hardly speak to some universal “Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West.” In fact, there is evidence to suggest that recent polling that indicates growing support for joining the EU reflects the Ukrainians’ response to what they see as Russian aggression and does not necessarily involve any abiding Ukrainian desire to join the West.
Wieseltier talks about four principles that guide the Ukrainian “revolution”: liberty, truth, pluralism, and moral accountability, but in each case his remarks obscure what is really happening in Ukraine. He talks about liberty, “the right of individuals and nations to determine their own destinies and their own way of life,” but ignores the fact that, for many Crimeans and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, the Euromaidan protests that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych took away their rights, as individuals, “to determine their own destinies.” This was not a democratic or electoral transfer of power; it was a coup against what was by all accounts a legitimately elected government. Weiseltier seems unconcerned that Ukraine’s revolution effectively disenfranchised vast numbers of Ukrainian citizens by short circuiting their electoral process. He also criticizes Russian propaganda that calls the Kiev government “fascist” without acknowledging that there are fascist or soft fascist elements involved with Euromaidan who have been given a significant role in the government.
But it is on the principle of “pluralism” where Wieseltier is most confounding. He says that “[t]he crisis in the Ukraine is testing the proposition that people who speak different languages can live together in a single polity. That proposition is one of the great accomplishments of modern liberalism. Putin repudiates it.” But Putin’s geopolitics aside, it was, in fact, the new Ukrainian parliament installed by Euromaidan that initially repudiated that proposition; its very first act was a repeal (passed but not signed into law) of a 2012 law that allowed regional languages to attain semi-official status in parts of Ukraine with sizable non-Ukrainian populations. The impact of this action in terms of stoking the fears of Ukraine’s Russian population about the intentions of the new government probably can’t be overstated.
It seems clear that, as Jim Sleeper writes, Wieseltier has “learned nothing from his moral posturing on Iraq.” As he and his colleagues in PNAC and the CLI did a decade ago, Wieseltier is still using the language of principle and moral absolutes to mask reality and support the desire for a more muscular American foreign policy.
]]>by Derek Davison
Russia moved to annex Crimea this week, as Ukraine evacuated most of its soldiers from the peninsula. Tensions in eastern Ukraine seem to have reached a tense equilibrium, even as reports of a Russian military build-up along its Ukrainian border raised the possibility of another incursion.
Recent [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
Russia moved to annex Crimea this week, as Ukraine evacuated most of its soldiers from the peninsula. Tensions in eastern Ukraine seem to have reached a tense equilibrium, even as reports of a Russian military build-up along its Ukrainian border raised the possibility of another incursion.
Recent events
Moving quickly on the heels of last week’s referendum on Crimean independence, in which Crimean voters nearly unanimously voted to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed into law a bill to formally annex the peninsula. On Thursday, one day before a temporary truce between Ukrainian and Russian forces in Crimea was set to expire, the Ukrainian defense ministry announced that plans were “well underway” to evacuate and resettle the roughly 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers currently stationed in Crimea to other parts of Ukraine. Pro-Russian forces stormed the Belbek airbase near Sevastopol, wounding one Ukrainian soldier and taking the base commander prisoner. The interim Crimean government issued an order for Crimea’s Tatar population to vacate part of the land on which it is currently settled, but insisted that it will allocate other land for Tatar settlement and that Tatars will be “well represented” in the Crimean government moving forward.
The New York Times characterized the situation in the eastern part of mainland Ukraine as “an uneasy calm” between “entrenched pro-Russian and pro-Western camps that scarcely existed before [the uprisings in Kiev].” Pro-secession fervor there is at a high level, particularly in large cities that tend to have higher proportions of Russians and Russian-speakers than the surrounding countryside. Friday’s announcement that the Ukrainian government had signed an association agreement with the European Union, a deal that will bring the two parties into “closer economic and political cooperation,” raised fears that tensions in the more pro-Russian east could rise still higher.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe announced that it would deploy civilian observers to Ukraine (not including Crimea), after Russia dropped its objections to such a move. However, NATO officials continued to express concern over an alleged Russian troop buildup along its Ukrainian border, suggesting that the units could be used either to invade mainland Ukraine or to cross Ukraine and seize control of the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria, whose leaders requested that Russia annex it earlier this week. The Russian government claimed that any troop movements were part of routine military exercises and that there were no plans to cross the border into Ukraine. Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, Andrii Deshchytsia, told American media that the chance of a Russian-Ukrainian war was “becoming higher.”
The United States and the EU levied further sanctions against top Russian officials and allies of President Putin on Friday. The new list of American targets includes Putin’s chief of staff as well as key figures in Russia’s energy and banking sectors. The EU list includes several figures who had been named in the initial round of US sanctions on Monday. A Kremlin spokesman said that the Russian government was “bewildered” by the new sanctions and promised that it would retaliate, which it then did by placing travel bans on several American political figures, including Senators Harry Reid and John McCain and Speaker of the House John Boehner.
There are two disputed narratives that are fueling the ongoing conflict:
Was the Crimean referendum legitimate?
Although the Ukrainian government appears to have no intention of contesting Russia’s annexation of Crimea on the ground, it, along with the US and EU, has insisted that last week’s referendum is illegal under both international and Ukrainian law. Russia has argued that the referendum was consistent with international law, specifically Article 1 of the UN Charter (which mentions “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” as one of the UN’s guiding principles), and Putin has specifically cited Kosovo’s secession from Serbia (which Russia opposed) as having set the precedent for this similar act by Crimea.
International law does not take a firm position on the question of self-determination versus national sovereignty. Without a clear declaration by a body like the UN Security Council there is no “law” that deals conclusively with Crimea’s decision to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Kosovo is a problematic case to use as precedent, given that its secession was the product of a war in which Serbians committed war crimes against Kosovar Albanians (though in fairness the Albanian rebels committed war crimes of their own). There is evidence of some mistreatment of Ukraine’s Russians, but a UN report (which Russia rejects) found no systematic abuses. However, the fact that the first act of the interim Ukrainian government was an aborted attempt to repeal the country’s law governing the use of official minority languages was cause for alarm among Ukrainian Russian-speakers.
Under Ukrainian law there is no question that the referendum is illegal, since Article 73 of the Ukrainian constitution requires that any changes to Ukraine’s territory be approved in an “All-Ukrainian referendum.” Last week’s Crimean vote was regional, and therefore does not meet this requirement. However, given that the Crimean and Russian governments do not recognize the authority of the interim Ukrainian government, they presumably reject its invocation of the constitution as well.
Is the Ukrainian government legitimate?
The Ukrainian government obviously thinks so, and so do the US and EU. But there is no disputing the fact that Viktor Yanukovych was the legally elected president of Ukraine before his ouster, and Russia’s official position has been that it still recognizes him as Ukraine’s rightful president, though it has not pushed for his restoration. Russia has characterized the Euromaidan protest movement that removed Yanukovych from office as an “armed fascist coup,” engineered with considerable American support. Far-right Ukrainian parties did play a large part in the protest movement, as evidenced by the sizable role that they have been given in the interim Ukrainian government. Moreover, a recording of a January phone call between Assistant US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt shows that American officials were at least discussing ways to assist the protest movement and what a post-Yanukovych government might look like. Russia also accuses the EU of having spurred the protests by forcing the Ukrainian government to choose between Russia and the EU rather than allowing it to have strong ties with both, an accusation that EU officials have denied.
On the other hand, the US supported a February 21st agreement that would have kept Yanukovych in office but restored Ukraine’s 2004 constitution (which reduced the power of the presidency relative to parliament). That deal collapsed when protesters (including the far-right elements of the movement) rejected it, despite the fact that several protest leaders had already signed off on it. Further, while the Nuland phone call is evidence that the US government supported the protesters, it is not in itself evidence of the level of that support, let alone of the idea that the US was actually behind the movement. The Obama administration contends that Yanukovych forfeited his authority when he fled the country after the February 21 agreement collapsed. Yanukovych, who also recorded a statement resigning his office, which he later retracted, was impeached and removed from office by the Ukrainian parliament. Nevertheless, there are serious questions as to the constitutionality of that impeachment vote and the manner in which Yanukovych’s successor was determined.
Photo: Crowds waving Crimean and Russian flags in Simferopol in Crimea after the referendum. Credit: Alexey Yakushechkin/IPS
]]>by Derek Davison
Crimeans voted “overwhelmingly” to secede from Ukraine and join Russia in a March 16 referendum. The Obama administration declared shortly after that “the international community will not recognize the results of a poll administered under threats of violence and intimidation from a Russian military intervention that violates [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
Crimeans voted “overwhelmingly” to secede from Ukraine and join Russia in a March 16 referendum. The Obama administration declared shortly after that “the international community will not recognize the results of a poll administered under threats of violence and intimidation from a Russian military intervention that violates international law.”
Crimean secession proceeds
Exit polls taken during Sunday’s referendum suggested that around 93% of voters supported the option to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia over the option to assert Crimean sovereignty under the terms of the 1992 Crimean constitution. There was no option in the referendum to maintain the peninsula’s status quo with respect to Ukraine. Crimea’s Tatar community planned to boycott the vote, though recent Russian efforts to reach out to the Crimean Tatars, through representatives of Russia’s related Volga Tatar community, may be easing the concerns that Crimea’s Tatars have around union with Russia. Large pro-Russian crowds reportedly gathered in the Crimean cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol to celebrate the results of the vote.
Diplomatic condemnation of the referendum from the United States and Europe was swift. On Saturday, before the referendum, the United Nations Security Council considered a resolution declaring Crimea’s referendum illegal, which was vetoed by Russia after China abstained and every other Security Council member voted in favor. On Sunday, President Barack Obama spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone, and according to the White House read-out of the call, “[h]e emphasized that Russia’s actions were in violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and that, in coordination with our European partners, [the United States is] prepared to impose additional costs on Russia for its actions.” Top Obama advisor Dan Pfeffer told reporters that the US is preparing to impose sanctions against Russian officials, including asset freezes and visa bans. The European Union seems prepared to consider similar actions, and EU foreign ministers are scheduled to meet in Brussels later this month to discuss next steps. Putin countered that the legal framework for Crimea’s secession was established by Kosovo’s secession from Serbia in 2008, and reportedly insisted to Merkel that the referendum was “in full compliance with international law.”
What happens now?
Amid concerns that the referendum’s outcome would quickly lead to a military confrontation between Russian and Ukrainian forces, it seems a temporary pause may have been achieved. According to Reuters, Ukraine’s acting defense minister told reporters on Sunday that “[a]n agreement has been reached with (Russia’s) Black Sea Fleet and the Russian Defence Ministry on a truce in Crimea until March 21.” It’s unclear what a “truce” means in this situation, when there have yet been no sustained acts of violence between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and when the Russian government officially continues to deny the presence of any Russian troops in Crimea beyond those stationed at its Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol.
Russia has yet to formally agree to annex Crimea, and leading Russian politicians have given verbal support to Crimean independence, but Putin has previously said that Russia has “no plans” to annex the peninsula. A decision to annex Crimea would bring with it an immediate crisis, given that the peninsula is almost entirely dependent upon the Ukrainian mainland for its electricity, fuel, and fresh water. If Russia does elect to annex the region, it may have no choice but to engage in negotiations with the new Ukrainian government, whose legitimacy it has thus far refused to recognize, over maintaining those services in Crimea until Russia can build the infrastructure to provide them instead.
Russia may also attempt to seize other parts of Ukraine outside of Crimea, which could render Crimea’s utility vulnerabilities moot. On Saturday, for example, Russian forces seized a Ukrainian natural gas terminal just north of Crimea, and Ukrainian forces reportedly surrounded the terminal in response. Russian media declared that Crimean “self-defense forces” had seized the terminal in response to the Ukrainian government cutting off the supply of gas to parts of Crimea. Pro-Russian demonstrators clashed with Ukrainian security forces in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, and two eastern Ukrainian cities carried out informal referendums similar to the one in Crimea; these events raised the possibility that Russian intervention could spread from Crimea to the eastern part of mainland Ukraine. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and another eastern region with a large number of Russians, has also seen demonstrations in favor of closer ties to Moscow. Russian troops are reported to be massing along its Ukrainian border, and the Ukrainian government has taken steps to form a National Guard and to mobilize military reserves, veterans, and volunteers.
On Monday, the Obama administration announced sanctions (travel bans and asset freezes) against 11 individuals, “to impose costs on named individuals who wield influence in the Russian government and those responsible for the deteriorating situation in Ukraine.” Included in this first round of sanctions are Dimitry Rogozin, Russia’s deputy prime minister for defense issues; Valentina Matviyenko, head of the upper house of Russia’s parliament; Crimean Prime Minister Sergey Aksyonov; and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The EU announced sanctions targeting 21 individuals, including Aksyonov, Rogozin, and Matviyenko, but the full list was not immediately available.
Western governments continue to threaten Russia with further sanctions against its interests, but European fears that Russia will cut off its supply of natural gas to Europe in response to draconian actions have complicated the situation. Natural gas exports from the United States are seen as one possible way for Europe to wean itself from Russian gas, but it is very unlikely that US exports could do much to alleviate the pain of a Russian shut-off, at least in the immediate future. On the other hand, analysts are pointing to the fact that Russia depends to a large degree on its oil and gas sales to Europe, and to the fact that Russian businesses have considerable ties to Western banks, to suggest that Russia’s vulnerability to sanctions may be higher, and its ability to punish those sanctions more limited, than has previously been assumed.
Western governments have also promised that financial and possibly military assistance will be provided to Ukraine. The US has pledged at least $1 billion in aid to Ukraine to help stabilize the government, but the measure authorizing those funds has been caught up in Congressional wrangling for several days and will be reconsidered when Congress returns to session on March 24.
Photo: US Secretary of State John Kerry addresses reporters before meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in London on March 14, 2014
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