BACKGROUND: Since September 11 Putin has frequently acknowledged the legitimacy of the foreign (not only American) military presence in the former Soviet Union. At the same time he and his government, most of which is more clearly against that presence as is the Russian elite, has insisted on a time limit to it as soon as hostilities in Afghanistan are over. Yet it is also clear that Russia’s security sector (police, intelligence, and military formations) cannot defend Russia or project power to the CIS effectively in order to defeat the scourge of terrorism or help those regimes do so. In spite of the fact that both Putin and the U.S. government have called for building a relationship between Moscow and Washington, the Russian bureaucracy refuses to follow through on American projects for defense cooperation for meaningful, as opposed to rhetorical, cooperation. Similarly Putin appealed to NATO for assistance in reforming the Russian Army so that it could fight terrorism. Yet here again foreign military observers in Moscow have unanimously observed that despite NATO’s willingness, programs for such cooperation remain mired in bureaucratic obstruction. Clearly neither Putin nor Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, nor the General Staff are willing to spend political capital to push such cooperation even though it could yield enormous payoffs in the war against international terrorism. All this leads one to conclude that Russia’s ambivalence about seeking help in the CIS from the West remains intact and paralyzes efforts at domestic reform and security. Indeed, from the conduct of the Russian government, it seems that it is more interested in consolidating a unilateral sphere of influence there that is beyond its powers to sustain, rather than to seek meaningful security or defense cooperation from the West which alone could give it the security from terrorism that it needs and claims to want.

IMPLICATIONS: Putin has pushed legislation that would essentially strip the election process and the judiciary of many of their already weak powers, and curtail the Duma’s attenuated powers to hold his regime to account, which would further reduce elections to a meaningless formality. Meanwhile it is very unclear exactly how any of these so-called reforms relate to Chechnya or will enable Moscow to carry out its goals there. Putin’s post-Beslan reforms seem directed at Russian domestic politics in the misplaced Tsarist notion that a band of virtuous knights who alone cherish state interests and report only to the Tsar can ensure security and good government. For Putin these knights are former KGB men or men with ties to it who supposedly incarnate the state interest above all other, allegedly partial or sectoral, interests. But these officials are, in fact, part of the same imperial, authoritarian mindset that has led to repeated disasters, as well as the corruption of the general state administration. They certainly have no concept of anything beyond state interests and an imperial and authoritarian concept of that state. These so called reforms also seem to suggest that Putin is again taking personal control of Chechnya and the North Caucasus. Yet not only is there no sign of reform of the armed forces that would make it more professional and more accountable to civilian democratic authority under law, and thus more capable of fighting terrorists. Instead Russian domestic and security policy are both regressing. Moscow remains obsessed with Georgia and seems to believe that by threatening it or even attacking it, that it will gain a decisive victory over the Chechens. Unfortunately this delusion resembles the Nixon Administration\'s misplaced belief of 1970 that attacking Cambodia and widening the Vietnam war could solve its problems. In any case, given the condition of the Russian army, it cannot be carried out today. Indeed, Russian attacks on Georgia would trigger an international crisis and a potentially military response for which Russia has no response, namely protracted war and occupation, contingencies clearly beyond Moscow’s capabilities. Moscow also remains stubbornly blind to the fact that its own support of secessionist groups in Georgia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan has legitimated the tactic of secession and of appeals to foreign forces for military support with which it now upbraids the Chechens. Worse, it refuses to see that by creating proto-states whose political economy combines war, racketeering, smuggling, trafficking in women and children, black market activities, large-scale gun running, drug trafficking, and official corruption as the glue that holds these regions together, it has created the very conditions that facilitated Beslan and other such attacks like those which took place in Moscow. The Putin regime seems unable to fathom or to accept that it cannot have or attain security in Russia by promoting insecurity all around its frontiers, especially if that insecurity is generated by Moscow’s support for what amounts to racketeers and gangsters. This direct instigation and support of separatist and corrupt activities may reward high-ranking players in the Russian government. But it certainly does not redound to Russia’s national interest, instead it facilitates the spread of the cancer of failing states and kleptocracies throughout the North Caucasus and the entire post-Soviet space. Likewise’ Putin’s contempt for exporting democracy abroad only strengthens the hands of these gangsters and those post-Soviet rulers whose follies could endanger both their regimes and Russia. Although Western governments would almost certainly support a democratizing Russia against terrorism, they clearly will not and cannot offer meaningful support to a country whose institutions remain unreformed, whose government remains both dictatorial and corrupt, and which actively fosters the conditions that facilitate the spread of terrorism even as it fights this threat. These simultaneous appeals and attacks demonstrate that Russia continues to display an entitlement mentality that help is owed to it but that it need not account for its activities or for what it does with that help.

CONCLUSIONS: Western support and participation in major security reforms is essential to Russia’s own well-being and security. So too is the renunciation of support for the kleptocratic proto-states created out of Georgia and Moldova. Whatever benefits they provide to various officials in Moscow and elsewhere pale behind the enormity of the threat that their very existence both legitimizes and facilitates. Moreover, continuation of such policies as support for them precludes the very support from the West that is vital to Moscow. Despite the best efforts of both the United States and other Western governments for genuine security cooperation in the Caucasus and Central Asia, until and unless Russia realizes that it must reform to survive and that its neighbors’ security is its own vital interest, such foreign support will be partial, limited, and tragically inconclusive.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Professor Stephen Blank, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013. The views expressed here do not represent those of the US Army, Defense Department, or the US Government.