Why Is Moscow Risking a New Cold War? - By Christian Neef

<blockquote>"Because the Russians feel duped. And because NATO refuses to ratify the "modified" CSE Treaty because Moscow has not yet emptied a storage facility of obsolete weapons in the small Republic of Moldova. Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, weapons in the new NATO member states are still counted toward the upper limits the CSE Treaty imposed on the now outdated "Eastern group of countries." Meanwhile, the Western alliance possesses a real advantage in terms of conventional armed forces.


The Russians call the situation "absurd," and even Western political scientists agree that it is time for NATO to change its position. Instead of seeking a negotiated solution, instead of reassuring the Kremlin that it is not out to contain or discriminate against Russia, critics say NATO has maneuvered itself into a corner. Moscow has not allowed any foreign military inspectors into the country since last December, and it has stopped notifying the rest of Europe about troop movements and military exercises."</blockquote>


RUSSIAN BEAR ROARS

Why Is Moscow Risking a New Cold War?

By Christian Neef
06/25/2008
Source

Strategic bombers off the American coast, battleships in the Mediterranean -- the Russian military is displaying its might once again with Moscow pumping billions into new weapons. But where does the Kremlin see its enemies today, and why is it risking another nuclear arms race with Washington?

At eleven o'clock at night, when the moon is reflected in the slow-moving waters of the Volga River, when the steppes are exhaling the heat of the day, and when the last bars are closing in Yekaterinburg and Pokrovsk -- old provincial cities on the river's left bank that are now called Marx and Engels --, Gennady Stekachov is on his way into world politics. And everyone can hear it.

The shutters shake in the crooked old wooden houses German settlers built 250 years ago, and the windowpanes rattle in the prefabricated high-rise apartment buildings from Soviet days.

The cause of the commotion is Stekachov guiding his 150-ton, long-range bomber down a runway outside the city and, together with his crew of seven other men, taking off into the night sky.

He follows his usual route north, up to the Arctic Sea and the Barents Sea, and then turns sharply to the West to circle the polar ice cap. The first NATO fighters, now on high alert, have appeared by the time Stekachov reaches the Norwegian coast. From there on the jets -- French Mirages, British Tornados or Norwegian F-16s -- escort the Tupolev Tu-95 past the Shetland and Faeroe Islands to a point off the American coast.

The men spend 16 hours in the air, with nothing but ocean below and not even a toilet on board. But despite the lack of comfort, the trip offers plenty of hair-raising excitement, such as when one of the NATO aircraft crosses Stekachov's path just below his aircraft, which can carry up to 16 cruise missiles to the most remote corners of the earth.

Stekachov finally sees a purpose to his profession, now that Russia is sending its strategic air force on patrol flights out into the world once again, following a 15-year hiatus brought on by a lack of funding. "In four months," he says, "my crew has flown seven missions to just off the American coast." Stekachov, a lieutenant colonel from a small, little-known city on the Volga, has had to wait 15 years for the experience.

If any Germans are familiar with Engels, a city of 200,000 inhabitants, 350 kilometers (217 miles) from the former Stalingrad, they know it as the capital of the former German Volga Republic, which Soviet dictator Josef Stalin dissolved in August 1941, banishing its residents to Siberia and Kazakhstan. And space flight aficionados might even know it as the city where Yury Gagarin, the world's first cosmonaut, landed with his parachute on April 12, 1961.

But Engels is more of a known entity for Russians. Moscow built its first school for military pilots there in 1930. Today, the city's airport is home to the 22nd Heavy Bomber Division of the 37th Air Army -- a unit that, in case of a nuclear conflict, would carry Russian nuclear bombs to targets in enemy territory. Thirty-seven large bombers are currently stationed at Engels for just this purpose. They include 18 Tu-95 four-engine propeller aircraft, known as "Bears" in NATO jargon, with a range of 15,000 kilometers (9,317 miles), and 15 Tu-160 jets, which Russians consider the world's most formidable flying fortresses, flying at top speeds of more than 2,000 kilometers per hour (1,242 mph) and with space for 40 tons of bombs on board -- known in the West as "Blackjacks."

Only a decade ago, the Engels air base was practically empty. Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin had ordered most of Russia's bombers moved elsewhere. But today a banner at the entrance to the air base encourages local residents to reignite the "glory of Russian weapons."

A hint of the Cold War has been revived between the East and West, since Russia began sending out its pilots on missions once again, since its aircraft, in a throwback to Soviet days, have reappeared on radar screens in the Western hemisphere, and since they have, on occasion, come within touching distance of the British border and flown over the American aircraft carrier "Nimitz" and a Japanese island (albeit unpopulated), to which Tokyo responded by dispatching two dozen fighter jets to drive out the intruders. "Our job is to show that since we are capable of flying this far, we are also capable of carrying weapons to our destination," says Major General Pavel Androssov, the commander of all strategic aircraft.

Back in Business

The Russian military, still one of the largest in the world, with its 1.1 million soldiers, is back -- and not just in the air. The navy is conducting exercises in the Atlantic and Mediterranean once again, and in February the "Yury Dolgoruki" was the first in a new generation of Russian submarines to leave its dock. The new craft is a giant among submarines, capable of firing 16 missiles carrying nuclear warheads and remaining submerged for up to 100 days. A major maneuver of the country's Arctic Sea and Pacific fleet will be conducted in one of the world's oceans this summer. The commander of the exercise is President Dmitry Medvedev.

In 2007, Russia's military budget climbed to 822 billion rubles, or $35.4 billion (€22.8 billion). And because oil is flushing more and more cash into government coffers, the Kremlin and its generals have set off a veritable fireworks of announcements recently. Moscow expects to own 50 strategic bombers by 2015, build as many "Topol-M" intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), as well as eight "Bora" (Gale) class nuclear submarines. It has also developed a new ballistic missile, the "Bulava" (Cudgel), and the T-95 -- the "tank of the 21st century" -- will be placed into service next year.

"The Russian military machine is back in business," writes Britain's Daily Telegraph, describing Russia's "dramatic increase in military potential." According to Lieutenant General Michael D. Maples, the head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), "Russia is trying to reestablish a degree of military power that it believes is commensurate with its renewed economic strength and political confidence." And for US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the modernization of the Russian military "underscores the importance of our sustaining a valid nuclear deterrent," in the future, as he told officers in the US Air Force in early June.

This is exactly the kind of language Moscow's military leaders like to hear. It makes them feel that they are being taken seriously once again. "People don't like the weak. They don't listen to them and they insult them. But if we have parity once again, they will be taking a different tone with us," says former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.

But what does it mean when the military chief of staff in Moscow, responding to US plans to install a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, is back to talking about the "preventive use of nuclear weapons?" When he threatens Georgia and Ukraine, both former Soviet republics, with "military and other measures" should they join NATO? Or when Moscow, as happened in December, suspends its participation in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty and calls into question other agreements, such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)?

Is this a show of strength for domestic political purposes, designed to bolster patriotic pride among Russians? Is Russia trying to return to the world stage with the tools of the 1970s? Or does the Kremlin truly feel threatened by the West once again?

Moscow's Akademiya Restaurant is on a small side street behind Tver Boulevard, next to a newly built synagogue. It is one of the chic establishments frequented by Russia's new elite. Stanislav Belkovsky, a thick-set man with a three-day growth, glasses and a receding forehead, who likes to have his breakfast here, is the head of the private Moscow Institute for National Strategy.

The notion that Russia is restoring its military might to a level close to that of the Soviet era has "nothing to do with reality," says Belkovsky. "It's part of the propaganda with which the Kremlin seeks to pull the wool over the public's eyes." According to an almost 70-page dossier titled "The Crisis and Decline of the Russian Army" and published by his institute, the military leadership should in fact resign en masse. The report suggests that the military's figures and announcements are sheer fantasy.

According to the dossier, the army has taken delivery on only 90 outdated tanks in the last seven years, all from the country's only remaining tank factory, in the Ural Mountains region. Experts ridicule the much-touted T-95, which has been talked about for 15 years, as a "fiction." During former President Vladimir Putin's term in office, the air force received only two new Su-34 fighter-bombers, and the Su-35 fighter jet, unveiled last year as a new model, is in fact a close cousin of an aircraft that was already airborne during former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's first year in office, 1985. According to the Belkovsky report, Russian designers are "no less than 20 years behind their US counterparts in the development of their fifth-generation fighter jets." Only 50 percent of all aircraft and helicopters nationwide are in operation, and the Russian military will experience a shortfall of 4,500 aircraft next year when outdated equipment is removed from service.

The situation is no less dramatic when it comes to nuclear weapons. Under Putin, 405 missiles and 2,498 nuclear warheads were decommissioned, but only 27 new missiles were produced -- three times less than under the Yeltsin regime, which was disparaged for being too soft on America. And the shelf life of 80 percent of Russia's mobile ICBMs expired long ago.

Belkovsky and his institute see the new "Topol-M" missile as a weapon "with a deterrent value of zero" -- because the Americans know where the missiles are stationed and are capable of striking the 100-ton projectile, along with its transporter, "with an accuracy of one centimeter" even as it is being driven out of its bunker. And the "Cudgel," the new "Bulava" ICBM, with which the military leadership plans to upgrade its nuclear fleet? Almost every test run so far has proven to be a failure. The SS-X-29, a top-secret weapon that features multiple warheads and, according to the Russians, is "invisible" because it can supposedly elude all missile defense systems, appears to have performed equally poorly to date. Only 12 vessels in the naval fleet, the core of Russia's nuclear shield, are currently equipped with ballistic missiles.

"In the 1990s, we managed to more or less maintain the strategic potential we inherited from the Soviet Union at the same level," says Belkovsky, smiling maliciously, "but since 2000, its reduction has progressed with the force of a landslide. We will lose our ability to contain our enemies at the nuclear level." Unless something changes under the new president, says Belkovsky, even Russia's conventional armed forces "will decline to the level of a medium-sized European nation in eight to 10 years, and we will not be able to keep up with countries like Turkey or Japan."

Better Big than Effective

Moscow political insiders consider Belkovsky's assumptions all too provocative, while some believe that he is hedging his bets and is in bed with Western intelligence agencies. But many other Russian military experts reach similar conclusions.

It is no coincidence that former President Putin was constantly pointing out that the US's military expenditures are 25 times greater than Russia's, says Alexei Arbatov, director of the Moscow Center for International Security. This, according to Arbatov, is why the Americans have 1.5 million men under arms and "a military of a quality that we must strive to emulate. However, we are only capable of funding a military with no more than 600,000 troops." According to Arbatov, the Russian military bureaucracy stands in the way of transforming the military into a smaller but more effective force. The military leadership's motto, says Arbatov, can be summed up this way: better to be big than effective.

The fact that Putin, throughout his eight years in office, never tired of celebrating the resurgence of the Russian army improved the Kremlin's standing among Russians (and brought the corrupt Russian weapons industry new orders). But Putin's propaganda backfired abroad, because it benefited Russia's rival, the United States.

Citing Moscow's efforts to modernize, President George W. Bush has asked the US Congress to approve $696 billion (€445 billion) in military spending for the next fiscal year. But the problem with his reasoning is that the Russian threat is nothing but a cheap excuse.

For years, the US Navy has been modernizing the Trident II ICBMs stationed on its submarines. The US military also plans to replace all 5,045 of its still-active nuclear warheads by 2012 -- an unbelievably costly program. It would be the first of its kind in 20 years, and critics question the need for such a program. And Washington's use of a missile to bring down a supposedly out-of-control spy satellite in February fueled suspicions, not just in Moscow, that the Americans have never truly abandoned their "Star Wars" program.

When a country sees itself as the sole remaining superpower, it expects to be able to act as it pleases. The United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limited the installation of missile defense systems. The START-1 Treaty, which reduces the number of long-range nuclear weapons, expires next year, and another Russian-American treaty to reduce strategic offensive potential will expire in 2012. Moscow's proposal to replace START-1 with a new treaty has been met with no response from Washington so far. By the time these treaties have all expired, there will no longer be any means of monitoring the enemy's military activities, including joint inspections, which have helped reduce mutual distrust in the past.

But the Russians are stuck in a vicious circle. To force Washington to agree to new disarmament programs, the Russians must first convince the Americans to take them seriously. The problem is that Washington is no longer impressed by Moscow's deterrent potential. By the end of 2012, both powers will have between 1,700 and 2,200 nuclear warheads left in their arsenals. But the Russians know that by then no more than 1,000 of their warheads will be serviceable anymore.

The Russians Feel Duped

Naturally, a power that sees itself as increasingly vulnerable will interpret its rival's advances as a provocation. America's plans to install missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, both countries near Russia's western border, were met with consternation in Moscow, as were the NATO alliance's advances in Russia's direction. All across Europe, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Moscow is now strategically cut off and marginalized.

Military experts in Moscow know full well that American missiles in Poland will be incapable of intercepting Russian ICBMs, in terms of both range and trajectory. The system presents "no direct threat whatsoever," says Arbatov, adding that claims to the contrary by Russian military leaders are blatant propaganda. But they are more than that. The Kremlin has been able to use the tiff over the US missile shield as welcome leverage to bolster its position in future arms control negotiations.

But why then is it withdrawing from an agreement like the CSE Treaty, which is designed to create more confidence in Europe, especially since Moscow is already "chronically incapable" of even exhausting the quotas for tanks and artillery "to which it is entitled under this treaty," as the Moscow Institute for National Strategy writes?

Because the Russians feel duped. And because NATO refuses to ratify the "modified" CSE Treaty because Moscow has not yet emptied a storage facility of obsolete weapons in the small Republic of Moldova. Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, weapons in the new NATO member states are still counted toward the upper limits the CSE Treaty imposed on the now outdated "Eastern group of countries." Meanwhile, the Western alliance possesses a real advantage in terms of conventional armed forces.

The Russians call the situation "absurd," and even Western political scientists agree that it is time for NATO to change its position. Instead of seeking a negotiated solution, instead of reassuring the Kremlin that it is not out to contain or discriminate against Russia, critics say NATO has maneuvered itself into a corner. Moscow has not allowed any foreign military inspectors into the country since last December, and it has stopped notifying the rest of Europe about troop movements and military exercises.

Spring came very late this year to Chebarkul, a small city on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. In May, when the ice had barely thawed in the area's many lakes, local farmers, following old custom, set fire to the grass in and along the margins of their fields. Thick clouds of smoke soon settled over the gray birch forests, which had not even leafed out yet, traveling as far as the provincial capital Chelyabinsk, 80 kilometers (50 miles) away.

Andrei Chabola also had the fields burned, if only for the sake of his tank -- to ensure that he would have a clear field of vision for target practice and would not set the grass on fire with his ammunition.

Chabola is 37, a colonel and already the deputy commander of the 34th Russian Motorized Rifle Division. He is a Russian through and through, tall, with a heavy, slightly ambling gait and a strong nose in a red-cheeked face. He is standing in the crow's nest of the control tower facing a tank training ground, the Chebarkul barracks behind him. A number of T-72 tanks are in the process of attempting to cross ditches and bridges at 45 kilometers per hour (28 mph).

"Comrade Colonel, tank obstacle overcome, no incidents, oil temperature normal," reports one of the drivers, stuttering in excitement. "Splendid," the commander graciously replies. The 295th Cossack Guards Regiment is in training.

The men driving these tanks are no longer conscripts. The Russian army has already begun training professional soldiers in Chebarkul, part of a growing career military that already numbers 100,000 nationwide. This number is the result of a compromise between the army leadership and the Kremlin, which has been calling for more effective armed forces since the bitter lessons of the war in Chechnya.

No one at this base makes a secret of his conviction that the decision made at the top is a big mistake. "Contract soldiers are in it for the money, not the fatherland," a colonel mumbles. He prefers not be identified by name. "Their only motivation is their lack of prospects. They come from the worst of families."

With two men from division headquarters in Yekaterinburg visiting the base, hardly anyone is willing to voice such criticism out loud. The military and the political establishment are already at odds. In Moscow, the general chief of staff was dismissed in early June because he considered the red-line policies of the civilian defense minister, a former furniture dealer, to be insane and dangerous. A tank training school has also been closed in Chelyabinsk, and the profession of officer "is worth nothing these days," says the colonel. But the Russian army's age-old problems still haven't been resolved. According to the colonel, the families of 122,000 officers have no fixed place of residence, and a lieutenant would "go to the dogs in Moscow" with the 12,000 rubles, or about €322 ($500), he is paid.

But when the talk turns to the West and greasy Ukrainian vodka begins flowing in the officers' mess, the men at the Chebarkul base express their opinions loudly and with one voice. "The Americans are building up their arsenals; they're surrounding us in Georgia and Ukraine," shouts Chabola, the deputy division commander. "They want to destroy us." And doesn't it sound "like a declaration of war," another officer asks, when Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, says publicly that the fact that Siberia, with its immense natural resources, belongs exclusively to Russia is one of the world's greatest injustices?

Although Albright repudiated the supposed quote long ago, the deeply humiliated Russian soul is unlikely to acknowledge her denials. But even the Russians know that the world, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, has become a different place. They know that the number of nuclear warheads a country possesses is no longer the deciding factor, that a surprise attack by NATO or a war between countries in Europe has become highly unlikely and that, for these reasons, simply counting tanks and howitzers hardly makes much sense anymore.

But what is the Russian military's mission, and for which potential conflicts must Russia be prepared? Even Colonel Chabola no longer believes that NATO is still the country's potential main adversary. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chabola served for two years in the eastern German town of Neustrelitz.

Moscow Obsessed with Its Arch-Rival

But then he was transferred to Blagoveshchensk, a city in the Amur region in the Russian Far East, directly on the Chinese border. "That's where more and more Chinese are buying their way into our territory," he says. "Siberia is big, and there are very few people who still live there today." To be exact, the population density on the Russian side of the border is two inhabitants per square kilometer, compared with 103 in the neighboring Chinese provinces.

The Chinese also came to Chebarkul last year, to take part in a maneuver called "Peace Mission 2007." In all, 1,400 soldiers and officers in the People's Army, as well as 300 airmen, had traveled 10,000 kilometers (6,211 miles) to this small Russian city in the Ural Mountains to spend nine days, together with Chabola's division, simulating the taking of a city occupied by "terrorists." The exercise was sponsored by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which was founded in 1996 to limit the American influence in Asia.

"The Chinese brought along their own combat technology, set up their own, separate tent city and videotaped everything, from every Russian tank to the soup pots in our canteen," says the colonel. "But whenever one of our men wanted to take a picture of them, their security people would step in right away."

This doesn't exactly sound like the friendship between the Soviet and Chinese people that both sides have insisted on in the past. Since border clashes erupted between China and the Soviet Union on the Ussuri River in 1969, Russian suspicions of Beijing have run deep. Chabola's officers are open about who they think Russia should truly fear: "the Chinese." One of the officers says that he read somewhere that Beijing has agreed not to pursue its territorial claims against Russia until 2015, "but what happens after that?"

These fears, as plainly as they are expressed by soldiers at this base, are merely worded somewhat more politely in the analyses of Moscow's political scientists. They write that the Kremlin and the military leadership still see the world through the prism of relations with the United States, and that Moscow is obsessed with a pathological desire for equality with its arch-rival and has no realistic understanding of future military dangers. According to the experts at the Institute for National Strategy, "the assumption that NATO is our main potential adversary seems rather doubtful today."

Russia should keep its eye on Beijing, says Stanislav Belkovsky, as he sits in the Akademiya Restaurant and broodingly stirs his cappuccino. According to Belkovsky, both China's propaganda and its military developments indicate that the country will expand primarily in the direction of Russia.

"What amazes us," says Belkovsky, the strategist who is so unpopular at home, "is that our leadership has simply ignored the Chinese threat until now."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan