Competing Claims

Russia has been attempting to achieve several important goals simultaneously. On one hand, it wants to ensure the country’s national security and territorial integrity. But the Kremlin also wants to gain back the influence possessed by the Soviet Union in Europe and around the world to re-establish its place as one of the leading continental powers. As Azerbaijan’s Constitutional Court Chairman Khandar Gadjiev described in his 1999 article “From Bipolarity to a New Configuration of Geopolitical Power,” the Moscow establishment strongly feels that “Russia cannot help but be a great power simply because it holds a unique place in the global geopolitical structure.” At the same time, Russia wants to make its foreign policy economically sensible. Europe and the United States are seen as external sources for the country’s economic modernization.

These goals contradict each other. Russia today is unable to independently assure its own security while also contributing to global stability. For that, it needs the tight bonds of partnership with and military and economic assistance from the United States, NATO, and the European Union. But it is this factor that is the very obstacle to an independent foreign policy. Moscow wants to regain it lost international authority, which it has traditionally done by opposing the West. But this damages the potential for a strategic partnership and decreases Russian security and its capacity for protecting its national interest and territorial integrity.

The threat of losing the country’s territorial integrity is underestimated as a factor in Russian domestic and foreign policy. But it is this factor that defines much of Russian policy, including Russia’s belligerent and at times criminal stance toward Chechnya. This factor defines Russia’s hesitance to share sovereignty, which is a key concept of European integration, and makes it unwilling to accept European legislation or sign international treaties that could undermine Moscow’s independence in the decision-making process.

In 2003, Putin put before his government the task of doubling the Russian gross domestic product in the next 10 years and creating a freely convertible ruble before his government. He began talking about Russia’s “real” integration into the world economy. To move forward Russia needs foreign investment, which in turn requires a partnership with the European Union, for which, incidentally, Russia has become the largest supplier of oil, producing 214.5 million tons compared to 161.1 million by the Middle East in 2002. The Kremlin thinks that being politically tied up in the European Union and NATO will rob it of its strategic independence and, consequently, subordinate it to US interests, preventing it from being an independent player in the global arena. But these scarcely veiled dreams of the Russian elite complicate the flow of investments and technological assistance from the outside and unnerve Europe, especially its Western half.

Role of Institutions

After World War II, the system of international organizations created with direct Soviet involvement guaranteed the Soviet Union an important role in international relations, and an influential place in all the major international structures. A permanent seat on the UN Security Council, coupled with a nuclear arsenal, guaranteed it parity with the United States in the second half of the 20th century. The Kremlin is extremely wary of any attempts to revise the foundation of the “Yalta system” of international relations because Russia could never play a role equal to the United States in any new system of international organizations. Moscow is assuming that the war on terrorism, NATO’s eastward enlargement, and the expansion of the European Union to 25 member states could be the beginning of the decline of the United Nations. Moscow has been trying to partly compensate the lack of quality in its own global influence through quantity, entering various non-UN bodies and even taking the lead in creating new international institutions with some former Soviet republics. These include the 2002 Agreement on Collective Security with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Russia, and Tajikistan, and the 2004 “Unified Economic Space” with Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia still has not formed a coherent position toward the world’s sole superpower, the United States. The post-Cold War thesis about “the inevitability of the improvement in relations between Russia and the United States” turned out to be misleading. When Putin declared his full and unconditional support for the United States on September 11, 2001, the move was seen as a strategic choice, “a revolution in Russian foreign policy.” But a few months later, US-Russian relations began to worsen once again. Without excusing US mistakes and miscalculations in foreign policy, it must be said that “strategic choice” did not turn out as such largely due to Moscow. In the past three years, the Kremlin has neither bothered to explain what Russia’s strategic choice for the United States means in practice nor take any steps toward realizing that choice. As the two countries lack a common value system, their relationship is missing a fundamental base.

The same holds true for the European Union. Speaking at the Council of the Federation in 2003, Putin stated that Russia’s biggest priority is real integration into Europe. “This is a historic choice,” he emphasized in an address before the Federal Council of the Russian Federation in May 2003. But even here it has been impossible to achieve real progress so far. The values of both sides remain very different. The Russian political regime is increasingly becoming more different not only from Western Europe, but also from its Central European counterparts.

Future Relations

Russia continues to search for a new model by which to position itself in relation to Europe. Former US Secretary of State Avery Dulles’s remark about England half a century ago could apply equally well to today’s Russia: it has lost an empire but has not found a new role. Russia borders on 15 countries, half of which are European. There is no other country in the world with so many neighbors. On one hand, this has always allowed Moscow to play off their disagreements and act as the major Eurasian power. But on the other hand, it held Moscow hostage to the situations within its sometimes unstable neighbors. And yet these regions were traditionally seen by Russia as what Putin has called “a sphere of our strategic interests.”