International

European Note Book
Moscow worries as NATO goes marching east
By Neville de Silva
This is the time of year when Europeans flock to the seaside to beat the heat and for some sun and fun. For those from the former Soviet Union and its allies, the Black Sea and its resorts have been (and still is) a favourite stomping ground.

Thousands upon thousands who could not break out of the restrictive controls of Soviet communism, the Crimea in the Black Sea was as far as they could go even if they had the financial means to venture farther.

Imagine the astonishment then of those who travelled to the Crimea this month for fun and frolic during this unusually hot summer and were greeted not by eager hoteliers and restaurateurs but by hundreds of placard-waving demonstrators who were not protesting about the quality of hotel services or the food.

This widespread protest has to do with the Cold War official terminated over 15 years ago but still lives on through emotive nationalism and concerns over security.

In the days of Joe Stalin and some of his successors such a public display of protest would have earned them an extended holiday not in Crimea but in the cooler wastes of Siberia. In fact there used to be a joke — probably started by the Americans- doing the rounds in cocktail circuits that the Soviet newspaper Pravda once ran a competition for the best political joke. And the first prize offered…… three years in Siberia.

But times have changed since then and Mikhail Gorbachev's adventurous approach led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the satellites that orbited round it.

Like the Roman empire many centuries ago the Soviet empire also fell and the satellites released from the gripping power of the mother ship went their separate ways.

Ironically some of the nations thus freed, sought membership in the US dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the western military alliance established in 1949 in the first years of the emerging Cold War between East and West.

The post-war division of Europe was further fortified by the creation of the Warsaw Pact, the Moscow-led military alliance in 1955 as a counter to NATO. The Warsaw Pact then consisted of the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland and Romania.

The implosion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 set its member states adrift and some of them sought sanctuary in the European Union where economic development and living standards were much higher than in the former Soviet bloc.

More than ten years after the first cracks appeared in the monolithic Soviet empire, four of its member states- Poland, Czech Republic (part of the former Czechoslovakia) and Hungary were invited and later joined NATO, the western alliance.

Today NATO has moved farther east and absorbed more of the former Soviet empire. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia are all in the alliance bringing its membership to 26.

This creeping expansion of NATO is bringing the military alliance, albeit with new imperatives and concerns, to the very doorstep of Russia. The next two candidates for NATO membership are the Ukraine and Georgia right on Russia's borders.

This is a kind of symbiotic relationship. NATO needs more of Moscow's former allies and republics to ensure their irreversible independence from Russia. They in turn need to benefit from the economic progress of the European Union and the freedom of movement to bring a better life for their peoples.
But they cannot really qualify for EU membership without first passing the litmus test of being a part of NATO.

This indeed is what is worrying Russia. No longer the super power it was Russia, especially under President Vladimir Putin, wants to play a much bigger role on the international stage than it had done in the first years of its implosion. A nuclear power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Putin wants Russia to re-assert itself as a major world power.
Part of its problem is that it is being hemmed in by Washington which in the name of fighting international terrorism has now located military bases some former Soviet republics.

So when Ukraine's president Viktor Yushchenko made joining NATO an election pledge and won the presidency last year defeating the Moscow-backed candidate, it seemed the writing was on the wall.

NATO and Ukraine were to have joint military exercises starting this month. But partly egged on by Moscow, partly by the Russian population in eastern Ukraine and partly by those seeking closer relations with Moscow, protestors demanded NATO stay out of Ukraine, physically blocking the way of US marines who had already arrived to prepare for the exercises and literally confining them to barracks. Moscow sees NATO's moves east as western meddling in its backyard. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Duma, the Russian parliament earlier this month that NATO's expansion into former Soviet republics would have a "colossal geopolitical impact."

It might be remembered that the Crimea was a part of Russia for centuries. But in 1954 the then Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev 'gave away' this strategic peninsula to Ukraine to mark 300 years of what he called "pan-Slavic brotherhood."

The 1997 Russian-Ukraine agreement recognised Ukraine's legal and territorial rights over Crimea. What makes the issue so sensitive is that Sevastopol, the capital city of Crimea, has been the home base of the Russian Black Sea fleet for over two centuries. The Black Sea fleet was the Soviet Union's counter to the US 6th fleet. For Moscow it remains a symbolic tool to help re-assert some of its power over its southern flank and have some control over future oil flows from the Caspian. The protests have caused the joint military manoeuvres to be postponed, if not cancelled.

President George Bush who was due to visit Ukraine this month has put off his visit. One reason is that domestically President Yushchenko remains unsteady despite his victory in the "Orange Revolution" that pushed back Putin's intention of keeping Ukraine under his thumb.

Right now the Ukraine has no national government or parliament because the pro-western parties have still not been able to settle differences and form a government.

How soon he will be able to improve relations with both Washington and Moscow will depend very much on how quickly President Yushchenko will be able to form an effective and stable government and show that he is in control.