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Reversal Of Fortune: Should Russia Be Booted Out Of The West'sExclus

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  • Reversal Of Fortune: Should Russia Be Booted Out Of The West'sExclus

    REVERSAL OF FORTUNE: SHOULD RUSSIA BE BOOTED OUT OF THE WEST'S EXCLUSIVE CLUB, THE G8? OF COURSE NOT
    By Owen Matthews
    Newsweek International

    Newsweek
    April 2 2006

    April 10-17, 2006 issue - Peter the Great built St. Petersburg in hopes
    that its sweeping neoclassical boulevards would prove to a skeptical
    Europe that Russia was no longer a barbarous Asian principality but
    part of mainstream Western civilization. As Vladimir Putin prepares
    to host this summer's G8 summit in the old imperial capital, he
    faces a similar challenge. Buoyed by a windfall of petrodollars,
    Russia's president has transformed his country from a dysfunctional,
    debt-ridden post-Soviet wasteland into a major world economic and
    political player. All that's missing is recognition from his peers
    that Russia is a full member in the club of the world's leading
    industrialized, democratic nations.

    He's likely to be kept waiting. Instead of a triumph, the St
    Petersburg summit is fast shaping up as the biggest rethink of
    Russia's relationship with the West since the collapse of the Soviet
    Union. Rather than the recognition that Putin craves, there's talk of
    diluting Russia's G8 membership with a revival of the old G7. Just last
    week, his old friend George W. Bush responded to calls to boycott the
    summit, after it was alleged that Russia had passed military secrets
    to Saddam, with a less-than-ringing endorsement: "I haven't given up
    on Russia." Give up on Russia? It was only eight years ago that Russia
    was ceremoniously welcomed into the G8. Yet now, critics in Brussels
    and Washington seem to talk of it as a borderline outlaw nation.

    Russia's reversal of fortune!in the eyes of the West!has been swift
    and remarkable. Europeans' confidence was shaken this winter, when
    the Kremlin cut off gas supplies to Ukraine just as much of Europe
    was finalizing long-term energy strategies tied to Russia. Then came
    a new Kremlin law restricting foreign NGOs working to build civil
    society in Russia!receiving, for their pains, a barrage of hostility
    and accusations of espionage. In recent weeks Europe's last dictator,
    Aleksandr Lukashenka of Belarus, was re-elected amid police brutality
    and heavy support from Moscow. Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the European
    Court of Human Rights (already reviewing hundreds of other human-rights
    complaints concerning Russia) has fast-tracked a complaint by the
    former Yukos Oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, jailed on charges
    of tax evasion and fraud after he challenged Putin politically. Soon
    European judges will have their say on the fairness of a case that,
    to many, has come to symbolize the Kremlin's abuse of power.

    Nowhere has the shift been sharper than in America. A tipping
    point came late last month, when the Pentagon claimed that Russia's
    ambassador to Iraq had passed U.S. war plans to Saddam Hussein on
    the eve of the invasion. That sparked a chorus of denunciations from
    Congress. "They've endangered American lives," thundered Sen. Edward
    Kennedy. "I think you'd have to rethink whether we're going to the
    G8 conference." More, the news set off a mini-avalanche of criticism
    of Russia's sins, from Putin's steady repression of civil society at
    home to his support of obnoxious dictators in Russia's near abroad.

    The new thinking is clearly set out in the White House's latest
    national-security strategy, issued last month. Washington's principal
    foreign policy objective, the paper said, was now the "support of
    democratic movements and institutions around the world." And U.S.

    Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns didn't mince words, either,
    when he spoke of exactly which regions of the world Washington has in
    mind. The United States would make a point of "encouraging democracy
    and withstanding oppression in Central Asia and the Caucasus," said
    Burns, as well as urging "Ukraine and Georgia to work toward ties
    with NATO and the EU." In the U.S. view, it seems, Russia has become
    a major obstacle to America's geostrategic interests.

    What a change from 2000, when Bush famously looked into Putin's
    "soul" at a meeting in Slovenia and found a reliable partner. Putin
    subsequently wasted little time engineering his vision of
    "democracy"!dismantling any sources of opposition, closing down
    independent TV stations and scrapping elections for regional governors,
    as well as waging a bloody war in Chechnya. But here's the rub. Much of
    Putin's anti-democratic crackdown took place in his first term, when he
    was still in good odor in Washington. So what's changed? The answer,
    says Alexei Arbatov, former chairman of the national Parliament's
    Defense Committee, is that "Russia is becoming more independent in
    its foreign policy; it's becoming more actively assertive in the
    former Soviet Union."

    >From the Kremlin's point of view, the "rethink" of Russian relations
    is sheer hypocrisy, sparked by perceptions that Russia is crossing
    U.S. interests. It began, perhaps, with the Kremlin's opposition to
    a U.S. war in Iraq. It grew with the ongoing nuclear confrontation
    with Iran. More recently, when Moscow invited Hamas representatives
    to Russia in the wake of their election victory, Washington complained
    that the Kremlin was abetting terrorism. "From now on the main criteria
    in the relationship between the United States and other countries will
    be their conformity to American notions of democracy," a spokesman
    for Russia's Foreign ministry said in an indignant rebuttal. And
    indeed, why shouldn't Russia pursue independent policies, its elites
    ask. After the mess the United States has made in Iraq, is Moscow
    supposed to stand idly by as, for example, Washington puts pressure
    on Tehran and the Palestinians?

    For all the hoopla surrounding the G8, and whether Russia should be
    considered a member in good standing, Moscow has ready and often
    reasonable answers to most of the charges against it. Clearly,
    democracy is in retreat under Putin, much as he tries to deny it. Yet
    it is also true that the Russian president has not been alone. His
    predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, long Washington's darling, was no slouch
    in browbeating practically all of Russia's media into supporting him
    when he was up for re-election in 1996. Yet when Putin did the same
    in 2004, the U.S. NGO Freedom House downgraded Russia's status from
    "partially free" to "unfree." (U.S. allies Jordan, Kuwait and Yemen,
    however, remained "partially free.") By the same token, Russia has
    been condemned in Europe and the United States for intriguing in its
    near abroad, from meddling in Ukraine's 2004 elections to backing
    repressive regimes from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Yet here, too, not
    only did Yeltsin support Lukashenka, but he also sponsored separatist
    wars in Abkhazia, Transdnistr, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh!
    specifically to punish breakaway republics for disloyalty to Moscow.

    Putin has rightly been tarred with Chechnya, but he inherited that
    war from none other than Boris Yeltsin.

    Perhaps nothing symbolizes Russia's new anti-democratic era more
    than the Khodorkovsky affair. Seen from the West, it's the case of a
    modern, reform-minded businessman cum dissident taken down by jealous
    bureaucrats threatened by his power. The charges against him!from
    tax evasion to fraud and money-laundering!have been dismissed
    as exaggerated if not trumped up. But while there's little doubt
    that the decision to prosecute Khodorkovsky was indeed politically
    motivated, the lesser-known truth is that the case against him was
    also deserved. As the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg
    prepares to hear a complaint by the oligarch's lawyers that the state
    "persecuted" their client, they would do well to heed such attorneys
    as Peter Clateman, a lawyer for Renaissance Capital in Moscow who
    has been following the case closely. As he tells it, the prosecutors'
    case was not only well put together but proved its claims beyond any
    reasonable doubt. "Khodorkovsky is guilty as charged," he says. The
    Yukos magnate went to extraordinary lengths to evade Russian laws
    and bilk the country of hundreds of millions (if not billions) of
    dollars. "You can't prevent a country from enforcing its own laws,"
    says Clateman. Indeed, even the CIA listed Khodorkovsky's Menatep
    Bank as one of Russia's most criminal in the late 1990s.

    Now come other flaps. In late March Putin accused Washington of
    "artificially pushing back" Russian accession to the World Trade
    Organization. "We have received a list of questions from our American
    colleagues requiring additional agreement which we considered settled
    long ago," complained Putin. And he has a point. Russia's the only
    major economy outside the 149-member WTO, and it has been trying to
    gain admission for 13 years. Washington says Russia needs to open up
    its banking sector and cut down on DVD piracy. Yet WTO member China
    has stricter controls on foreign banks and, admits Dan Glickman,
    president of the Motion Picture Association of America, pirates more
    DVDs. As if to add insult to injury, Ukraine, a major intellectual
    property infringer, is on the verge of WTO membership, thanks to U.S.
    support.

    It remains to be seen how reports that Russia's ambassador to
    Baghdad, Vladimir Titorenko, passed sensitive war intelligence
    to Iraqi officials will play out. Russian officials say they have
    nothing to hide. "It was no secret that we maintained diplomatic
    relations right up to the end," says one Russian diplomat in Moscow,
    speaking on background. "In the framework of those relations, there
    were extensive briefings and exchanges of analysis." Both the Kremlin
    and the Bush administration seem determined to keep such tensions
    from escalating. But there's no mistaking the chill in the air. A
    recent report by the influential Council on Foreign Relations in
    New York urges "the democratic members of the G8, including the
    United States," to "protect the credibility of the organization" by
    "effectively reviving the G7 within the G8." The purpose: to "convince
    Russia's leaders that ground that has been won can also be lost."

    Is Russia's membership in the Western club really so precarious? Of
    course not. President Bush, for one, hasn't even flirted with the idea
    of not going to St Petersburg. But Russia-baiting is a dangerous
    game, even so, for it risks alienating the West's main ally in
    Russia!Putin himself. For all his faults, he is a modernizer and
    far more benignly disposed toward Europe and the United States than
    most in the Kremlin!or the Russian population. "Being valued by the
    West is very important to Putin," says Arbatov. "He considers Russia
    a great Western power!that's the basis of his world view. Excluding
    him would be a personal insult, like spitting in his face." As if
    sensing that danger, Bush tried to tone down the rhetoric: "I still
    think Russia understands that it's in her interest to be West, to work
    with the West, and to act in concert with the West." Fair enough. But
    having to say so only testifies to how wide the divide has grown.

    --Boundary_(ID_6LOFC0GOkJ1ntXZ8sos5Rg)--
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