Kremlin struggles with Ukraine-NATO relations

Though Moscow will likely use a range of covert and public measures to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, should the Kremlin fail to halt the accession of its ally into the alliance, the end result will not be another Cold War.

By Simon Saradzhyan in Moscow for ISN Security Watch (16/12/05)

If there is anything that the hawkish part of Russia’s ruling regime would agree with Zbigniew Brzezinski on, then it is that Ukraine’s entry into NATO could bury hopes of Russia re-emerging as a global superpower any time soon.

It is in Russia’s interests as perceived by the Kremlin to either coerce Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s administration into abandoning the drive for NATO or try to facilitate a regime change in Ukraine to prevent its further integration into the Western security alliance. This could be done by boosting financial support for the traditionally pro-Russian opposition against Yushchenko in eastern Ukraine..

These coercive policy tools are both public and covert and could include measures such as threats of 100 per cent hikes on gas. Anti-NATO sentiments could be also incited in the Crimea and in eastern Ukraine, where 70 per cent of the population oppose Ukraine’s entry into NATO, compared to the national average of 51 per cent, according to results of an opinion poll conducted by Russian pollster VTsIOM in late October.

The upcoming parliamentary elections in Ukraine and the weakening role of the president thanks to constitutional reforms would also offer the Kremlin a chance to alter the course towards European integration pursued by Yushchenko and his allies.

However, should these efforts fail and Ukraine’s entry into NATO become inevitable, this will not become a showstopper in Russia’s relations with NATO, Western Europe, and the US in general.

Should Ukraine enter NATO, Russia would probably review and revise the entire spectrum of its security, political, and economic relations with Ukraine and other neighbors ahead of this entry to try and minimize the perceived negative consequences of Kiev’s accession to the alliance.

Russia is likely to stir up anti-Western rhetoric once the process of Ukraine’s accession to NATO reaches a final stage, but it will likely neither alienate the US and Western Europe nor try to act as a long-term spoiler.

While this issue may be used extensively to rally the public on a variety of domestic and foreign policy matters, the Kremlin seems to realize that the costs of trying to exact revenge or act as a spoiler if Ukraine does enter NATO outweigh the benefits.

This is clear even for the hawks in President Vladimir Putin’s team, given the scope and importance of Russia’s economic and political cooperation with the US and Western Europe as well as personal business interests that Russia’s ruling elite has in maintaining amiable relations.
Belarus could be the real show-stopper

But while Moscow might be forced to tolerate Ukraine’s entry to NATO, a regime change in Belarus that would turn the country into a pro-EU state with NATO aspirations could become the real showstopper.

Russia would certainly try to compensate for the loss of Ukraine’s already questionable neutrality by attempting to upgrade the Collective Security Treaty organization (ODKB) into a full-fledged military alliance with a standing combat-ready force. The recent statements by chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Yury Baluyevsky indicated that the ODKB would be part of the Russian military-political leadership’s response to Ukraine’s entry.

“Attempts are being observed to weaken the Commonwealth through recruitment of CIS states into NATO,” Baluyevsky said in an apparent reference to Ukraine earlier this month. “Russia will defend its interests” vis-à-vis this process, the four-star general told Russian reporters, Interfax reported.

Baluyevsky’s remarks followed a warning by Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov that Russia would end military-technical cooperation with Ukraine if it joined NATO. Security Council chief Igor Ivanov also earlier this month accused the US and NATO of pressuring former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

In spite of this rhetoric, Russia will in all likelihood continue to maintain bilateral defense and security relations with the most powerful of individual NATO members, such as the US and “Old Europe” countries, even if Ukraine does win entry to NATO.

However, Russia may still walk out of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and force other ODKB members to follow suit, but such a move would also likely be accompanied by an offer to launch a partnership between NATO and the ODKB.

It is less probable that Russia would want to withdraw from the Russia-NATO council, given the relative prestige it gives, as Russia is perceived as an equal partner in the organization. However, it may similarly demand that it become the ODKB-NATO Council or alternatively ask for a power of veto over certain decisions.

In fact, the Kremlin’s policy to try and add the ODKB to the equation became clear at a recent NATO-Russia meeting of foreign ministers, when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov tried to position himself as representing the ODKB rather than Russia alone.

While keeping Armenia and other members of the ODKB anchored, Moscow will likely continue to woo Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan by a combination of sticks and carrots to try and balance out the strengthening of the roles of NATO, the US, and the EU in the Black Sea and Caspian sea regions, which Ukraine’s membership in the alliance would facilitate.

Russia may also seek to transform the Shanghai Group into another full-fledged alliance with commitments of mutual assistance in case of aggression to further strengthen its position on the arena of the continental politics vis-à-vis NATO.

On a less grand scale, Ukraine’s entrance into NATO could force Russia to start withdrawing its Black Sea fleet from the Crimea earlier than 2017, which is the year the current lease agreement expires. Deputy chief of Ukrainian President Yushchenko’s secretariat, Anatoly Matviyenko, told a press conference in Kiev last week that Ukraine might demand that Russia pay more for renting coastal areas and infrastructure for its Black Sea fleet in the Crimean peninsular.

Under the 1997 agreement, Moscow is supposed to pay US$93 million a year, but that gets written off in the lieu of Ukraine’s debt for gas deliveries.

Matviyenko floated this prospect of raising the rent, which can be implemented only if the 1997 agreement is renounced, in response to Russia’s demand that Ukraine pay more for Russian gas. Yushchenko - who himself publicly floated the idea of raising the Black Sea fleet rent this spring - did not publicly follow up on the threat of his subordinates, and his press secretary, Irina Gerashchenko, told the same Kiev press conference that the Ukrainian leadership would oppose linking the gas talks to other issues. Instead, the Ukrainian president expressed hope on Monday that both sides would find a “mutually beneficial solution”.

However, while belligerent rhetoric in the gas war will subside sooner or later, questions on whether the Russian Navy should pull out of Sevastopol before 2017 will linger as Ukraine boosts its efforts to entry to NATO.

In addition to the navy, Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN) may also start feeling the negative impact of Ukraine’s NATO bid soon. In fact, the RVSN may have to phase out SS-18’s and other Soviet-made ICBM’s, that Yuzhnoe of Dnipropetrovsk has designed, produced, and contracted to extend service lives of, according to a report by Nezavisimaya Gazeta earlier this month.

Similarly, the Russian air force also depends on Ukraine’s Antonov design bureau and Artyom holding for servicing and extending lives of Antonov planes and R-27 air-to-air missiles. Ukraine’s Sich Motors is also the exclusive supplier of engines for Russian military helicopters and Ukrainian plants supply most of turbo gas engines for Russian warships. However, the reliance on Ukraine for servicing systems and extension of service lives will decrease as these and other systems age and get decommissioned.

As for conventional systems, Russia’s military-political leadership fully realizes that the national defense industry can no longer produce the full spectrum of weaponry. Therefore, ties with suppliers of non-key elements of Russian defense systems will not be ended due to such political considerations, as Ukraine’s membership in the bloc.

As for key future projects, Russia has been already looking for other partners, such as India, which has been invited to take part in the fifth-generation fighter project. As for the Black Sea fleet, Russia’s military-political leadership has realized the inevitability of withdrawing this fleet from Sevastopol and is investing into construction of new bases in Novorossiysk and other parts of that Russian coast. This is more of a financial than a security sacrifice, as regardless of where it is based, the Black Sea fleet cannot bypass the Bosporus straits if it is to operate in the Mediterranean or further in the ocean zone.

However, one weak spot remains when it comes to the negative impact that Ukraine’s entry into NATO would have on the combat potential of the Russian military, which may find it costly and time-consuming to compensate for loss of access to the data collected by early warning radars in Mukachevo, Transcarpathia, and Sevastopol, Crimea.

Whether Ukraine dismantles Mukachevo and Sevastopol radars - as Latvia did with the Skrunde facility - or re-directs the flow of data to NATO, the loss of these two radars would deal the heaviest blow to the level of the combat preparedness of Russia’s strategic triad. Even with Mukachevo and Sevastopol, the triad’s early warning system is already half-blind, given the loss of Skrunde and the failure to replenish the fleet of early warning satellites in what increases the possibility that the triad could react to a false alarm by launching real nuclear missiles.

But while being tangible, the loss of these two radars easily could be offset if the Defense Ministry convinced the Kremlin to add the early warning to the list of priority federal program and wrested enough cash from the ballooning stabilization fund to build new radars and launch new satellites.

According to Aleksander Franchikhin of the Institute of Political and Military Analysis in Moscow, however, Russia should unilaterally scale down cooperation with Ukraine regardless of whether the two sides agree on gas prices this time, as Kiev is seeking NATO membership under the new leadership and will probably eventually gain entry to this alliance.

First and foremost, Russia should first minimize dependence of its ICBM fleet and early warning systems on Ukraine, according to both Franchikhin and Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST).

And, while trying to replace Ukrainian subcontractors with Russian ones, Moscow can leverage with Ukraine because many of the Ukrainian suppliers of Russian arms makers have no other markets to diversify to and, thus, are as dependent on their Russian partners, the experts.

In general, Ukrainian industries need Russia as much, if not more, as Russian industries need Ukraine, as Russia is the largest market for Ukraine’s industries, such as the pipe and defense industries. On the other hand, the EU mostly imports raw materials from Ukraine, they said.

According to Vitaly Shlykov, former deputy defense minister and one of Russia’s leading independent military experts, Russia should not revise its arms production cooperation with Ukraine at all over the neighbor’s NATO membership bid because it can no longer hope to single-handedly design and produce the entire spectrum of weaponry it needs.

“This spat over gas reminds me of the banana wars fought by the United States and Europe,” he told ISN Security Watch. “It should not be allowed to spill over into military-industrial cooperation as no country in the world can hope to produce an entire range of weaponry, not even the United States, to say less of Russia.”

Simon Saradzhyan is a veteran security and defense reporter based in Moscow, Russia. He holds a degree in public administration from Harvard University, where he studied international security and wrote a working paper on nuclear terrorism. He is a co-founder of the Eurasian Security Studies Center in Moscow.