Doubts about Putin’s credentials

American Ambassador John Tefft presented his credentials to President Putin today in Moscow. Putin’s remarks were pointed:

We are ready for practical cooperation with our American partners in various fields, based on the principles of respect for each other’s interests, equal rights, and noninterference in internal matters.

That “we are ready” betrays Moscow’s reaction to the sanctions squeeze the EU and the US have mounted. It is hurting, as is the fall in oil prices. Moscow is wise to be signing big contracts to sell gas to China, but it will be years before deliveries begin. In the meanwhile, a budget calculated at over $90 per barrel is under real pressure. The ruble’s fall compounds the problem.

Less promising is Putin’s concept of respect for each other’s interests and equal rights. He has promulgated an expanded notion of Russia’s interests. They extend in his thinking to all Russian-speaking populations in neighboring states. The pattern is clear:  in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, Moscow has preserved or carved out separate governance for Russian speakers (in South Ossetia and Abhazia, Transdniester and Crimea). He is trying to do the same thing in the Ukrainian part of Donbas, a region that straddles the Ukraine/Russia border.

This is not an effort to reconstruct the Soviet Union. Putin may regard its collapse as a catastrophe, but he knows that the more Western-oriented parts of the Soviet empire are not going back to Moscow’s fold. What Putin is doing is akin to Milosevic’s effort to implement the Serbian nationalist dream of all Serbs in one state by helping Serb-populated territories outside the borders of Serbia proper establish or sustain separate states. Milosevic failed in Croatia and Kosovo and ended up with hundreds of thousands of Serb refugees who fled from those places. But he succeeded in Bosnia, where Republika Srpska is the kind of separate governance Putin envisages in Donbas.

Putin’s concept of “noninterference in internal matters” also merits scrutiny. I was told repeatedly during a fall visit to Moscow that Americans needed to understand that Ukraine is an internal issue for Russia. That was sufficient evidence for me that Moscow does not respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. More evidence:  the Russian claim that the US promised that NATO would not expand. The constant public refrain of the Americans after 1989 was “Europe whole and free.” In what universe does “free” not include the right of European states to join whatever alliance will have them?

Of course Putin also means by noninterference that Washington should not support democracy advocates in Russia. He has in fact restricted US efforts to support independent voices and cracked down on many of them. Here he is within his rights I suppose, as the United States was (from an international law perspective) during the Cold War when it restricted the activities of the Communist Party. But Senator McCarthy’s red scare wasn’t the America’s proudest moment. Imitating it won’t be Russia’s. Allowing and protecting dissent is a sign of a state’s strength, not weakness.

Putin accepted John Tefft’s credentials. But America should have profound doubts about Putin’s.