Rival Power, page 6
That was a rather harsh judgment. Russia had made real diplomatic gains. Besides its seat in the Contact Group, it won a place in the steering board of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC)—the international body overseeing the Dayton settlement and the work of the UN-appointed High Representative.42 Russia was one of the guarantors of peace in Bosnia, together with the Western powers, Turkey, and Japan. The United States and its European allies seemed to view the outcome in a similar light. In the words of Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State, “what (Russia) wanted most was to restore a sense, however symbolic, that they still mattered in the world. Behind our efforts to include Russia in the Bosnian negotiating process lay a fundamental belief—that it was essential to find the proper place for Russia in Europe’s security structure, something it had not been part of since 1914.”43
After the War
Russia remained engaged in post-Dayton Bosnia, though its ambitions were scaled down. Multiple contradictions riddled its policy. On the one hand, Moscow did go along with the Western efforts at rooting out Karadžić’s influence within Republika Srpska. On the other, it objected strongly whenever the Stabilization Force (SFOR) and Western powers, the United States first and foremost, applied force to impose their will. Thus, the Russians did not do much to oppose America when it weighed in on the side of RS President Biljana Plavšić as she clashed with Momčilo Krajšnik, the Serb member of the tripartite collective presidency of Bosnia and a prominent ally of Karadžić. What they did instead was to keep Plavšić at arm’s length and deny her a meeting with Yeltsin, despite her wishes.44 Furthermore, Russia threw its weight behind the High Representative Carlos Westendorp as he pressed the Bosnian government on issues such as common citizenship of the state and the appointment of ambassadors, threating a boycott by the international community. Russia did not obstruct the introduction of the so-called Bonn Powers in December 1997, allowing the High Representative to pass extraordinary legislation as well as remove elected officials. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) became more vocal only when British commandos, part of the SFOR, launched an operation to arrest a Serb official charged in July 1997 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In Moscow’s reading, these actions had gone well beyond the peacekeepers’ mandate to police the peace deal and facilitate economic reconstruction. The suggestion that the peacekeepers should go after Karadžić himself was anathema as well. The Russians argued that this could rupture the fragile settlement. Generally, officials in Moscow were in two minds about The Hague tribunal. As a matter of principle, Russia supported it, having voted in favor of the original UNSC resolution to establish an international body to prosecute war crimes. However, it viewed the ICTY as something of a leftover from the “internationalist phase” under Andrei Kozyrev. When the ICTY acquired teeth after Dayton, including arrests and trials, the media in Moscow were quick to dismiss the tribunal as victors’ justice as well as a prime example of the double standards underlying American foreign policy.45
The end of the Bosnian war spelled opportunities as well. It was possible for Russia to reinvigorate political and economic links with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, its principal ally in former Yugoslavia, and play the role of facilitating its reintegration into international society. Moscow spearheaded the effort to have the sanctions against Belgrade removed at the earliest possible moment. It criticized the United States over hints that the restrictions, which the UN Security Council agreed were to expire after Bosnia held its first elections (September 1996), could be extended and linked to the FRY’s commitment to domestic democratization. At the UN, Russia solicited support from Britain and France for its campaign to bring Serbia and Montenegro back from the cold. Bilateral ties grew stronger and deeper. After a visit to Belgrade by the newly appointed Foreign Minister Evgenii Primakov in May 1996 (more about him below), the Russian government lent the FRY $150 million—allowing the latter to repay outstanding debts to Gazprom. The two defense ministries signed a co-operation protocol as well. However, the Russian leadership was fully aware that placing all bets on Milošević, who had proven to be unreliable on more than one occasion, was an ill-advised choice. Starting in 1998, it identified the Montenegrin President Milo Đukanović (aged just thirty-six at the time), who was veering away from Milošević and towards the West, as a partner who could be trusted.
The other benefit of Dayton, from a Russian perspective, is that it presented a test case of working with NATO. General Leontii Shevtsov served as deputy supreme commander of the SFOR, together with General George Joulwan, the U.S. Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), under the elaborate command-and-control mechanism that allowed Russia to be fully integrated but still separate.46 Although Moscow’s relations with the Atlantic Alliance were far from perfect, because the latter was on the verge of expanding eastwards, its diplomats, notably Foreign Minister Primakov and Vitalii Churkin, believed a modus vivendi was possible and desirable. Analysts concurred. The military’s attitude was more hostile. There were certainly those influenced by the experience of co-operating with NATO troops on the ground in Bosnia. However, even they continued viewing the alliance through a zero-sum lens.47 It is hardly coincidental that the commander of Russia’s Airborne Brigade stationed in the town of Ugljevik (northeastern Bosnia), Colonel Nikolai Ignatov, and Lieutenant General Nikolai Stas’kov, commander of the Airborne Troops (Vozdushno-desantnye voiska, or VDV), played a central part in the so-called dash to Prishtina in June 1999 (more below). Although NATO typically hailed the IFOR/SFOR as a success story of military-to-military co-operation with Russia, some in its ranks took a dim view. General Wesley Clark (SACEUR, 1997–2000) put it bluntly: “l had closely observed the double standard the Russians had in the Bosnia mission. They took care of the Serbs, passing them information, tipping them off to any of our operations … while keeping up the pretense of full co-operation with us.”48
The Kosovo Debacle
The 1998–99 Kosovo crisis put Russia’s policy in former Yugoslavia to another rigorous test. The outcome was even more frustration at the West. Yet again Moscow had to face up to its diminished status and stomach another American-led intervention. Russian decision makers confronted an already painfully familiar dilemma. Their ties to Slobodan Milošević provided them with leverage and bolstered Moscow’s international standing. But the wily and unscrupulous Serb leader could be a liability just as well, threatening to put Russia on a collision course with the United States and its allies. With NATO’s air strikes against Serbia, Operation Allied Force (OAF), Moscow had to choose between two bad options—providing military assistance to embattled Serbia or bowing to the West. Either way, its national interests were bound to suffer.
Kosovo bruised Russia’s ambition to reinvent itself as an independent center of power in a multipolar world. It found an ardent advocate in Kozyrev’s successor at the Foreign Ministry, Evgenii Primakov. The former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR, Sluzhba vneshnei razvedki) saw alignment with countries like Iran, Iraq or indeed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, ostracized though they were by the West, as an asset for Russia as it strove to interact with the United States as an equal. Appealing to nationalists and the security establishment, Primakov was nonetheless a pragmatist—like most of his fellow gosudarstvenniki. With the May 1997 Russia–-NATO Founding Act, he traded Russia’s acquiescence with the alliance’s expansion for guarantees that no external military forces or nuclear weapons were to be stationed in new member states. Primakov’s was a simple logic. Russia could do little to stop enlargement so it might as well sell its reluctant endorsement dearly. According to Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s man on Russia, the essence of Primakov’s strategy was “to play a weak hand well.”49 It is an irony that an accomplished Realpolitiker like him would end up in a situation as intractable and risky as Kosovo.
Part of the reason was that the crisis caught Moscow off-guard. Following Dayton, the Balkans went down Yeltsin’s list of priorities. The watershed presidential election in June–July 1996, the conflict in Chechnya, and the 1998 financial meltdown kept the Kremlin busy. But, in fairness, the rest of the Contact Group was not prepared either. The United States had taken the deliberate decision to keep Kosovo off the table in Dayton. Milošević had transformed, literally overnight, from problem maker to partner. It was only the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1997–98 that changed the equation. Even so, the Russian leadership’s disinterest stood out. Oleg Levitin, second secretary at the embassy in Belgrade in the 1990s, reminisces:
I attended most meetings between Kozyrev and Milošević in the mid-1990s. To the best of my knowledge, the Russian side never initiated any serious discussion of Kosovo at that time. On those occasions when the topic did arise, Kozyrev limited himself to listening to Milošević’s version, which was far indeed from reality. At such moments, I felt like a time-traveller overhearing the Conversations with Stalin, recorded so famously by [Yugoslav politician and dissident writer] Milovan Djilas: Stalin asking the Yugoslav delegation in the mid-1940s to explain something about these mysterious Albanians, but contenting himself with meager explanations and concluding that Moscow had no need to take an interest in Albanian matters.50
Such indifference is all the more striking given the centrality of Kosovo in Russian discourse on international politics since 1999 and, arguably, in the popular psyche too (e.g. Russian football fans chanting “Kosovo is Serbia” at international fixtures).51 But it does underscore the point that mental maps evolve and conceptions of history evolve and change over time.
To be sure, Primakov was an exception, in that he took an interest in Kosovo. Levitin testifies that the new foreign minister surprised Yugoslavs in having dwelled on the issue unexpectedly long at his first meeting with Milošević in May 1996. That made only marginal difference. Up to 1997, Moscow vetoed the inclusion of Kosovo in the Contact Group’s deliberations, concerned about the link to Chechnya. If the West was putting Milošević to the test over a separatist movement in a volatile corner of Serbia, what would stop it doing the same with regard to Russia’s own restive province in the North Caucasus? The connection between Yugoslavia and the threat of further disintegration in Russia and the wider post-Soviet space, which had come to the fore in the early 1990s, was very much alive in the mind of Moscow’s foreign-policy elites.
When fights between the KLA and Belgrade security forces escalated in 1998, Moscow tried to forge a position whose tenets were that military action by NATO was unacceptable, and no settlement was permissible without Russia. As in the past, the overarching priority appears to have been Russia’s standing in European security affairs. However, Moscow was short on substantive ideas as to how to resolve the conflict and engineer compromise between Belgrade and the Kosovar Albanian leaders. It was late establishing links with the moderate wing around President Ibrahim Rugova and never accepted the KLA, sniping at its leaders’ presence in the Rambouillet negotiations in the spring of 1999.
In the initial stages of the conflict, Russia seemed to have a strong hand. Primakov, promoted to prime minister in September 1998, assumed the role of intermediary between Belgrade and the West. His efforts bore fruit. Talks between Yeltsin and Milošević in June of that year resulted in a ceasefire and the deployment of a fifty-strong observer mission, including Western diplomats and military personnel. Even more important, Russia helped avert NATO strikes in September and October. First, it threw its weight behind UNSC Resolution 1199 (23 September) demanding a ceasefire, a withdrawal of Serb forces, and the return of refugees. When NATO handed an ultimatum to Belgrade, Russia negotiated a new verification mission, this time under the auspices of the OSCE. It looked as if Russia was having, yet again, its Sarajevo 1994 moment.
Yet, just like in Bosnia, Serbian intransigence wrong-footed Russian policy. Milošević was not willing to call off the anti-KLA operations. Refugee flows out of Kosovo intensified. The massacre of forty-five Kosovars at Račak in January 1999 pushed NATO to the brink once more. The end result was the alliance’s air campaign against former Yugoslavia. Not only did it bring about the worst crisis between Russia and the West but it also exposed Moscow’s weakness. Russia maneuvered itself into a situation where it faced a stark binary choice: fight NATO head-on together with Milošević or retreat and accept the fait accompli created by the United States and its allies. Moscow opted for the latter, suffering a humiliating setback.
Initially, the Russian leadership, still basking in the glory of their achievement from October 1998, responded to the uptick of violence in Kosovo by posturing and upping the ante. Moscow’s rhetoric toughened. Yeltsin went on record that he would not allow war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Together with Primakov, he clearly underestimated NATO’s resolve to act, the dangers of a potential escalation for Russia, and the extent of his leverage in relation to the United States and the EU.52 The Rambouillet conference (February–March 1999) was a missed opportunity. Instead of pressuring Milošević to accept a compromise and then use his consent to secure better terms from the West, Moscow backed Belgrade’s rejection of the proposal for Kosovo’s autonomy. The point of contention was the military annex, which the FRY delegation interpreted as conferring on NATO the right to occupy the country’s entire territory, an argument that Russia bought. Having obstructed or delayed for months on end the Contact Group’s efforts to come to a settlement, Moscow could not offer an alternative plan of its own either. It effect, its stiff resistance at Rambouillet signaled to Milošević that Russia would stay firmly on his side in the game of chicken he was about to embark upon.53
The ensuing NATO campaign against Serbia highlighted the mismatch between Russia’s ambitions and capacity to shape events. Moscow could embarrass the Western coalition by scrapping co-operation with NATO and practically freezing ties with the United States. Primakov made history by ordering his airplane back, in the middle of the Atlantic, upon learning from his host, Vice President Al Gore, about the imminent air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The turn-around stood out as a symbol of deteriorating relations between Russia and the West and pushed Primakov’s popularity ratings at home through the roof (Vladimir Putin was still a largely unknown figure at that point). Russia furthermore did its best to expose Operation Allied Force as a severe violation of international law and the hallowed principle of state sovereignty. Its implied veto made it pointless for America, Britain, and France to solicit an enabling resolution from the UN Security Council. Instead, the NATO allies justified the air campaign on extra-legal grounds, pointing to the humanitarian disaster, gross violations of human rights, and refugee exodus, all of which it aimed to reverse (later known as the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention”). Yet Russia could do little to stop the bombs. It was unwilling and unable to project military force into former Yugoslavia. Even if it was to do so, the Atlantic Alliance enjoyed “escalation dominance.” In other words, it is doubtful whether Russia could muster and deploy conventional military force on a meaningful scale so as to push back against NATO, short of resorting to its nuclear capability.
The Russian leadership chose diplomacy over military force. It claimed the moral high ground, underscoring that their concern was not Serbia, much less Milošević whose implication in ethnic cleansing was beyond denial, but rather the integrity of international law. NATO’s actions were an affront to rule-governed order, an undisputed common good. However, Russia failed to capitalize on its stance. The UN Security Council members opposed a draft denouncing the intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which the Russians introduced together with India. What was even more humiliating was the reluctance of most members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, apart from Belarus and Tajikistan, to support Moscow. Most former Soviet leaders elected to maintain a low profile with the United States.
The Kosovo war made the already emasculated Yeltsin vulnerable at home. His bellicose rhetoric was coming back to haunt him. Gennadii Seleznev, the communist speaker of the Duma, revealed that Russia’s nuclear arsenal was taking aim at NATO members—a claim the Kremlin rushed to deny. Anti-Western mood was rampant. “It is Russia which is being attacked,” clamored newspaper headlines, TV news, and mass demonstrations at the gates of the American Embassy and the NATO Information Office in Moscow. “NATO’s Aggression is a continuation of Hitler’s 1941 [invasion of USSR],” one placard read.54 The Kremlin came under sustained pressure from the usual suspects in the Duma and the military high command. Short of direct military involvement, radical voices advocated sending arms to the Serbs to help them repel NATO’s jets. Reports accumulated of groups recruiting volunteers to be sent to the Balkans, an echo of the Slavic Committees active in the Russian Empire during the 1876 Serbian–Ottoman War. Predictably, Vladimir Zhirinovskii, head of the Liberal Democratic Party, vented his anger, but the United States also drew opprobrium from liberals such as Grigorii Iavlinskii who nonetheless opposed military involvement. To them, the anti-Western turn undermined years of democratic and market reforms. In a show of solidarity, the leading reformist politicians Egor Gaidar, Boris Nemtsov, and Boris Fedorov flew to Belgrade. It appeared that the era of co-operation with the West ushered in by Gorbachev was coming to a close.
