MOSCOW, 23 July 2004 — If you are one of the world’s dwindling number of old Soviet-era leaders, trapped in your villa with the annoying winds of democracy blowing in the streets outside, there might be worse things than having longtime Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov knock on your door. But not many. Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic got the Ivanov knock on Oct. 6, 2000, right when he was counting most on Russia’s support against the wave of opposition supporters who were in the streets proclaiming the victory of his popularly supported rival, Vojislav Kostunica. Within hours of meeting with Ivanov, the Serbian dictator conceded defeat.
Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia heard it on Nov. 23, 2003, when Ivanov delivered the news that Russia feared that bloodshed could result from the Georgian president’s standoff with the forces of the “rose revolution’’ unfolding in the streets outside. Shevardnadze, within hours, bowed to the inevitable. By early May, another standoff was brewing in the Black Sea region of Adjaria, where longtime Moscow ally Aslan Abashidze repeatedly proclaimed his intention never to back down in his standoff with the new, democratically elected Georgian authorities. Then Ivanov darkened his door. Abashidze left on Ivanov’s plane for Moscow that night.
As the aircraft rose through the Georgian darkness, Ivanov poured the now-former Adjari leader a drink. He told him whatever it is that the Russians tell old allies whose relationships have grown inconvenient — no, impossible — in a world in which Russia is no longer a superpower. Ivanov’s role as the Terminator of Russian diplomacy underscores an important shift that has occurred in its foreign policy in the last decade, as Russia has moved from playing the role of global powerbroker to defining and focusing on its own national interests.
Increasingly, Russia has been forced to rethink old relationships, faced with NATO’s expansion into former Soviet republics; democratic movements springing up in countries including Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Yugoslavia, and the United States establishing a growing diplomatic and military foothold from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea.
Ivanov, foreign minister for five years before being appointed secretary of the Russian Security Council in March, has been a key architect of the nation’s move to focus on its “near abroad’’ — the former Soviet republics around its borders whose futures it sees as inextricably linked with its own. Ivanov has also championed the move to supplant the confrontational dialogue with the United States that characterized the Cold War with an attempt to form global alliances against what he sees as the common threat of international terrorism. In his book “The New Russian Diplomacy,’’ Ivanov emphasized the need to pursue foreign policy goals that were far from traditional: Creating conditions for sustained economic growth, increasing the standard of living for Russian citizens, protecting national security, defending the rights of Russian citizens abroad. He rejects the “artificial juxtaposition’’ of East and West.
“We need to proceed from the realities we live in. The 21st century makes an age which is seriously different from the situation at the end of the 20th century,’’ Ivanov said in a recent interview. “On the one hand, the world stopped being split into two opposing blocs after the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, new threats and challenges emerged which declared themselves in full voice on Sept. 11.
“These threats are not of an ideological character, and they are not aimed against one state or groups of states; they are aimed against all of humanity. These threats bear a global, trans-border character, and they should be answered in kind.”
That meant that Shevardnadze, with whom Ivanov worked years ago in Moscow when both served under the same government, had to be held accountable not only to popular democratic forces, but for years of reluctance to crack down on Chechen separatist rebels who had used Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge as a base for attacks on Russia. It meant recognizing that Milosevic had outlived any usefulness to Russia, said Gleb Pavlovsky of the Effective Policy Fund, a political strategy group with close ties to the Kremlin.
“What kind of guarantor was he of Russia’s national interests?” Pavlovsky said. “Russia’s historical clout in the Balkans was being sacrificed (by Milosevic) for the sake of the interests of a number of shadow-economy corporations that traded in weapons, cigarettes and gasoline.... Milosevic failed to become a donor in Russia-Yugoslav relations. He was only a beneficiary of Russia’s political gifts.” Ivanov’s role called on to deliver “the political version of euthanasia” underscores what Oriel College-Oxford lecturer Mark Almond, in a recent Moscow Times commentary, called “Russia’s retreat... from Brezhnian overstretch” that he said ultimately could impair Russia’s control over its most significant economic resource, oil and gas.
As the United States opens military bases near the Caspian Sea and eases in friendly leaders along a key oil pipeline route in Georgia, “Russia’s own energy resources are falling under the shadow of US power, and the routes to export Russian oil or gas, independent of Washington’s sphere of influence, are narrowing,” Almond said.
Although it is “a normal reality” that these nations pursue their own expanded relations with the United States, he said, “At the same time, we would consider it wrong and contradictory to our interests to . . . start pushing Russia away from this space. If the United States thinks that it is correct to declare the zone of the Caspian Sea as a zone of their vital interest, then I do not need to explain that Russia has many more grounds to claim the entire . . . (region) as the zone of our vital interest, because it is the zone which passes all around or borders.”
Russia has kept many of its former republics dependent on Moscow by becoming a key supplier of oil and natural gas, literally capable of keeping the heat turned on in satellite nations including Belarus. Russia has established its own military bases in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, and has hinted darkly that its considerable remaining nuclear arsenal remains on standby if NATO should suddenly move into an “aggressive” posture on Russia’s borders. At the same time, he said, Russia had no hesitation about approving US plans to open military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to launch the first front of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan — the Taleban posed a similar threat to Russia, Ivanov said.
“There exists a point of view that the US could take advantage of this and, under the pretext of the operation in Afghanistan, could strengthen their military presence in Central Asia,” he said.
“We hope that the American leadership will act on this issue in accordance with the promises made: That this military presence will be tied with the antiterrorist operation in Afghanistan. And when this threat is liquidated, the necessity of the US military presence in Central Asia will be no more.”
With Shevardnadze, Ivanov said, he never attempted to force the Georgian president to step down. “The term ‘resignation’ was never featured in my consultations with Shevardnadze or with the opposition leaders. I did not persuade Shevardnadze to resign. . . . It would have been senseless, knowing Shevardnadze, with whom I had worked for six years as an aide. The decision he made was made by himself, when I had already left Tbilisi.”
In Adjaria, the region of Georgia that had maintained close ties to Russia even after Georgian independence, Ivanov said he made it clear to Abashidze that a crisis was possible if he did not come to terms with Georgia’s newly elected leader, Mikhail Saakashvili.
“Lots of armed people were out in the streets. There was sporadic shooting. And the atmosphere was aggravating very rapidly,” Ivanov said. “We spoke for about three hours.... He knew that I came not with some bad plans, but with good intentions.
“And after the consultations, Abashidze came in and said to me that he had only two ways: Either to leave the country and thus avoid bloodshed, or to resort to armed resistance, which would lead to . . . loss of human life. And he said, ‘In the interests of my people, I have made the decision to leave the country.’ And we got on the plane and flew away.’’
The real issue for Russian diplomacy, some analysts suggest, might be whether it manages to go the next step — from easing out the old dictators, a role in which Moscow now seems quite adept, to actually forming strategic alliances with the pro-democracy movements that are angling to take their place. In countries such as Ukraine and Belarus, said Andrei Kortunov, vice president of the Eurasia Foundation in Moscow, “The question is, at what point is Russia ready to revise its position and take risks by supporting the more radical, more progressive and more flamboyant candidates?
“Probably, for something like this, you need someone who will be more willing to take risks than Ivanov someone ready to step down to a new generation of leaders.”
