Интересная статья The Guardian

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The Russian bear is back - and
this time it's gas-powered

· Petrodollars give Putin weight on world stage

· America is 'nervous and angry', say observers

Ian Traynor, Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow and Ewen MacAskill in
Washington
Saturday
May 13, 2006

Guardian

In the
Kremlin on Thursday a little-known but powerful Russian official held court for
the first time before foreign journalists with a very simple message: Russia is
great and getting greater by the week.

Sergei Sobyanin, a former governor of the oil-rich region of Tyumen, chief of
staff to President Vladimir Putin, and one of the mightiest men in Russia, was
enlarging on his leader's state-of-the-nation speech 24 hours earlier in which
Mr Putin identified the key to Russia's progress in both human and military
regeneration.

The shrinking of Russia's population had to be reversed. Russian mothers
would be paid to have more babies. And for the first time in ages, Mr Putin
talked of missiles and nuclear rearmament.

The obvious if unstated enemy was not Chechen "terrorists" or "coloured"
revolutionaries from the former vassal states of the old Soviet Union but the
old foe, the American "wolf", with its voracious appetite dressed up as phony
concern for human rights and the spread of democracy.

"Russia's international weight rises every year," Mr Sobyanin boasted. The
country is strong, wealthy, and throwing its restored weight around
internationally.

After 20 years of decline combined with the festival of liberty ushered in by
Mikhail Gorbachev's revolution in 1985, the bear is back. Helped by a tide of
petrodollars, his "national champion" gas and oil titans projecting Russia's
power abroad, and his authority unassailable at home in contrast to Bush, Blair
and Chirac, Mr Putin is walking tall on the global stage.

The climax comes in July in his hometown, the old imperial capital of St
Petersburg, when Mr Putin hosts the leaders of the world's richest seven
countries.

The rest of the world is worried. The US has concluded that Mr Putin
represents a clever return to traditional Russian authoritarianism. Central and
east Europeans, all too familiar with Russian domination, are quaking. Western
Europeans, mired in introspection, are waking up to the new challenges. All are
scrambling to devise new policies towards Russia.

Andrew Kuchins, a Russia expert at Washington's Carnegie Endowment, said: "It
is a precarious situation. We need cool heads and for neither side to
over-react."

Aleksandr Vondra, a former deputy Czech foreign minister, said: "The
post-cold war world is somehow finally starting. We all need to sit down and
come up with an agenda, new policies."

Alexander Rahr, a biographer of Mr Putin and Germany's leading analyst of
Russia, said years of western cooperation with Russia were giving way to
rivalry. "Putin is starting to set the international agenda. The Americans are
getting nervous and angry. The US wants to prevent this but has very limited
means to do it."

A week before Mr Putin delivered his address to the nation, the US
vice-president, Dick Cheney, went to Russia's Baltic border to read Mr Putin the
riot act.

Five years ago at a country house outside the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana,
George Bush first met Mr Putin. The US president said he looked into the eyes of
the former KGB officer, caught a glimpse of his soul and saw a man he could
trust. But now, with the bitterness of a jilted lover, Mr Cheney called an end
to the US romance with post-Soviet Russia.

"None of us believes that Russia is fated to become an enemy," he declared,
before accusing the Kremlin of exploiting Russia's mineral wealth to blackmail
and bully foreign customers, of reversing the democratic gains of the past
decade, of "improperly" curbing Russians' rights.

If Mr Cheney's attack was the strongest ever on Mr Putin from the Bush
administration, the vice-president's criticisms can be heard all across
bipartisan Washington.

Bruce Jackson, an influential neo-con lobbyist on Russia, said: "It's a
difficult time now for the Russia romantics. The people who over-invested in
this are in intellectual and political trouble right now."

Mr Cheney's Lithuania speech was preceded by criticism from Condoleezza Rice,
the US secretary of state. Mary Warlick, her Russia department chief, said last
month: "The promise of strategic [US-Russian] partnership has not been fulfilled
... the jury is out about where Russia is going to end up."

Leading Republicans and Democrats, such as John McCain and John Edwards, have
joined the chorus of what critics of the new line call Russophobia.

Mr Kuchins says the Kremlin is enraged by the American lectures but Mr
Putin's speech showed his contempt. "Putin lumped together the US, Africa and
Latin America and that is new. That is part of the response: 'You Americans no
longer are important to us, so piss off'."

The Russian response has been to warn of a new cold war. This seems an
over-reaction but the frostiness does suggest what Mr Jackson calls the onset of
a "soft war". He welcomes it. "There's nothing wrong with a battle of ideas," he
says. "It's a soft power competition. It's desirable."

Mr Jackson sketches three fronts on the new battlefield of ideas and values
between Russia and the west: "Our institutions versus their Potemkin
institutions, free markets versus their coercive state monopolies, and our
democracy versus their managed democracy. What we don't want is militarised
competition."

As well as Mr Putin's quiet and methodical consolidation of control over the
past five years, the fundamental reasons for the balance of power tilting Mr
Putin's way is money, derived from colossal mineral wealth when oil is selling
at more than $70 a barrel and when the state corporation Gazprom has a monopoly
on supplying a third of Europe's gas supplies.

He has paid off much of Russia's foreign debt and built a $62bn (£33bn)
"stabilisation fund" from the windfall. Russia now has some of the world's
biggest financial reserves; Gazprom recently overtook BP as the world's
second-biggest energy firm by market value, and Mr Putin has eliminated all
important rival centres of power in Russia while enjoying consistent popularity
ratings of more than 70%.

The outcome, analysts predict, is that if he stands down after two terms as
scheduled in 2008, Mr Putin may be gone but "Putinism" will remain. "The
transition will be smooth - he will handpick his successor," predicts Mr Rahr in
Berlin. "Putin will be like a Russian Deng Xiaoping, still there behind the
scenes."

But these strengths are also weaknesses. Russia's new wealth is utterly
dependent on the markets and the price of oil, which can fall as well as rise.
And Gazprom's power is umbilically linked to Europe, which provides two-thirds
of its revenue. "They need Europe as much as Europe needs Russia," said Chris
Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank in Moscow.

Nonetheless, Russia's new clout is making itself felt on the biggest problems
on the international agenda - Iran's nuclear ambition is number one. Russia is
the biggest block to the US and Europeans punishing Tehran and Mr Cheney's
attack looks unlikely to change Moscow's policy. Quite the contrary; there is
talk in Washington that Mr Cheney timed his speech to dash any chance of a
diplomatic breakthrough on Iran since, as a hawk, he favours confrontation with
the mullahs.

Hamas and Palestine is another neuralgic point, with the Kremlin at odds with
the west on how to deal with the "elected terrorists". There are even
suggestions that Russia sees itself as better able, with China, to sort out
Afghanistan, branding the US and Nato missions a failure.

And in the contest for influence among the post-Soviet states bordering
Russia, Moscow is recovering ground after setbacks in Ukraine and Georgia. It is
asserting control of central Asian gas by agreeing distribution deals with the
despotic regimes of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while slapping trade embargoes
on pro-western neighbours such as Moldova and Georgia, which says a Russian ban
on wine imports and a brief halt to gas supplies were revenge for closer ties
with the west.

Georgia's foreign minister, Gela Bezhuashvili, said Russia's "imperialist
mentality means they still see [Georgia] as a backyard that cannot have its own
choice. And they are squeezing us for our European choice, that is clear."

Mr Putin's speech this week, he added, was "a wake-up call ... for Europe to
realise who they are dealing with."

In the long term, Mr Rahr predicts, Russia could lead a new "gas Opec", a
Eurasian gas cartel controlling central Asia and backed by China. "Gas will be
more important than oil in the future. What will that mean for the world
economy?"

Mr Jackson also identifies the Caspian basin and the Black Sea region as the
cockpit of the tussle between Russia and the west, a battle of ideas that is
also a fight for markets and energy security.

What has changed in the balance of power, say long-term Russia watchers, is
that for most of the two decades since Mr Gorbachev began dismantling the Soviet
Union Russia has been in decline.

Mr Vondra, in Prague, said: "The west was setting the agenda and Russia was
reacting, on the defensive. Now that Putin has completed his renationalisation
and consolidation of power, he is setting the agenda and it is the west that is
on the defensive. Energy policy is a classic example. But it's not a new cold
war. Its weapons are not missiles but oil, gas and uranium. Putin has a long
vision, while the Europeans are very short-sighted."

In Washington, Mr Kuchins says relations between Russia and the west are now
at their worst since 1999, when Boris Yeltsin named an obscure apparatchik and
ex-KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, as his successor. "The difference with '99 is
Russia was in the toilet and had no leverage. Now we have a real
competitor."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian
Newspapers Limited 2006

Comments

[mustt.livejournal.com]

в интонации, по-моему

[mc-abr.livejournal.com]

В Вене тоже Die Presse любит поговорить про гонку вооружений и пост-колд войну

[josef-gotlib.livejournal.com]

а чего нового?
Ну, европейская Венесуэла.
Мне вот только не нравится, что мооя пенсия и паевые инвестиции опосредованно зависят от русской нефтянки, но это другая история.

[ptichman.livejournal.com]

Полагаешь, что представляют публике преемнега?

Ethanol.....

[mewhoelse.livejournal.com]

"Our institutions versus their Potemkin institutions, free markets versus their coercive state monopolies, and our democracy versus their managed democracy."

and maybe Russia vs Ethanol as in:

a. From 140 mil to 100 mil by 2100 (population). I am sure chronic alcoholism helps.

b. As in $40 per barrel makes ethanol a viable alternative to oil.