Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher

expansion to take in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, revealed the emptiness of any such project. This, it will be recalled, was when President Yeltsin warned: ‘NATO will get as good as it gives. We have sufficient deterrent forces, including nuclear forces.’*

      For as long as they could afford to do so, the Russians also frustrated Western aims in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. If Russia was supposed to be the West’s partner there no one seems to have told the Kremlin. As a result of NATO’s Kosovo air campaign against the Serbs in March–June 1999 Russia suspended all military contacts with NATO. But most revealing of the emotional temperature among Russia’s military and political elite was the threatening language they again used. The chief of the General Staff pointed out that he supported ‘the use of nuclear weapons to protect Russia’s territorial integrity’. The chairman of the Defence Committee of the Duma helpfully suggested that the state’s strategic concept should be amended to include the option ‘to deliver pre-emptive nuclear strikes’. Another retired general demanded Russia’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

      The fact that the Russians acquiesced in Kosovo and eventually seem to have helped bring President Slobodan Milošević to the negotiating table reflected their weakness rather than their good will. Above all, it reflected their economic weakness, for the IMF was about to release a further tranche of $4.5 billion over eighteen months when the campaign began. Even then, the Russian generals (with or without the knowledge of President Yeltsin) sent Russian troops to seize Pristina airport, for the sake of swagger, so risking with no apparent concern a major international confrontation.

      Russia has for centuries grown used to compensating for its economic underdevelopment by means of its military strength. For the Soviet Union, particularly in the last decades of its existence, such an approach was the only means of remaining a superpower. Today’s Russian leaders appear to have inherited something of that outlook.

      But only something – for although it has over a million military personnel, and its defence spending still probably runs at over 5 per cent of GDP, the state of Russia’s armed forces as a whole is pitiful.* Non-payment of wages or payment in kind has left soldiers and sailors in some areas forced to grow cabbages or to engage in black-marketeering to avoid starvation. Morale and discipline are generally bad.

      This has made some Russian generals and politicians keen to maximise the effectiveness of their most sophisticated weaponry. Both President Yeltsin and President Putin have emphasised the central importance of Russia’s nuclear defence. In November 1993 Russia’s new military doctrine both ended the previous Soviet pledge of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons and outlined more flexible options for their use. In April 1999 President Yeltsin responded to the opening of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia by holding a special meeting of his Security Council on the subject which he opened by stating that ‘nuclear forces were and remain the key element in the national security strategy and Russia’s military might’. Mr Putin chose to make one of his first visits as President to a centre for nuclear weapons research at which he told his audience: ‘We will retain and strengthen Russia’s nuclear weapons and its nuclear complex.’ The symbolism and the message were clear.

      Russia has been concentrating on the development of a new generation of missiles and warheads, while seeking to extend the life of existing weapons systems. The most important new programme is that of the SS-27 Topol-M Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Russia’s problem is that the cost of maintaining any kind of nuclear parity with the United States is likely to be prohibitive, given the rate at which Russia’s existing arsenal is becoming obsolete.

      President Putin was widely praised in the West for having secured the Russian Duma’s endorsement of the START II treaty. He has more recently called for further substantial reductions to America’s and Russia’s nuclear arsenals. The driving force for these proposals is penury rather than mere goodwill. But they may well make sense all the same. For as long as Russia continues to hold a nuclear arsenal which it cannot afford properly to maintain, the rest of the world will be at risk of such weapons falling into the wrong hands or of an accidental launch. Furthermore, Russian scientists and advanced technology must if at all possible be kept in Russia to be productively redirected, not put up for sale to the highest international bidder.

      Another potential worry for the West is posed by the former Soviet Union’s chemical and biological weapons capability. Such weapons are notoriously difficult to detect by ordinary verification techniques. They can be easily hidden, as we know from Saddam Hussein’s activities in Iraq. They can also be developed alongside or under cover of ordinary commercial, civilian processes. Three Russian officials have been reported as saying that Russia has twenty-four poison gas factories, six of which it plans to destroy and eighteen of which it has either converted or will convert to non-military uses.* Unfortunately for us, the Soviet Union’s biological weapons programme was very closely integrated into ostensibly civil programmes of research. There are worries about how far the necessary disentanglement has gone. Above all, however, it is the possibility of such weapons developed covertly in a Russian laboratory falling into the hands of rogue states or terrorists that is the main worry.

      In the end, it is probably upon the massed if uneven ranks of the Russian army that any credible projection of Russian power depends. At present Russia’s armed forces are demoralised and their resources depleted. But it would not be wise to assume that this will always be so. The Russians are traditionally a martial nation. While it is most unlikely that Russia will ever again be a global superpower, it will remain a great power – too big to rest content within its own borders, too weak to impose itself far beyond them. All of which makes for troubling instability.

      But the West has to cope. How?

       We must never forget that Russia has a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. So some of the most important Western aid programmes are those, like the Nunn—Lugar programme aimed at ensuring proper oversight of Russia’s nuclear weapons, which satisfy our own security needs. Indeed, in all our dealings with Russia, the right approach is to put our security interests always and everywhere first

       We must try to persuade Russia that its willingness to sell military technology to rogue states may well rebound against Russians – both for reasons of basic geography and in view of Russia’s problems in its relations with much of the Muslim world

       Finally, we dare not take Russia for granted: the seeds of danger are often planted in the soil of disorder, as the world has learned to its cost before.

      NATIONALITY PROBLEMS AND THE ‘NEAR ABROAD’

      Russia is a huge country that covers eleven time zones. Its border – thirteen thousand miles of it – is the longest in the world, running from Europe to Eastern Asia. This gives Russia a unique opportunity to interfere in other countries’ affairs – particularly because so many of its neighbours were for so long subject to Moscow’s domination.

      The fact that Russia’s nation-building and its territorial expansion were in tsarist times so closely interlinked means that Russia has traditionally regarded its frontiers as fluid not fixed. The Cold War stasis lent an appearance of permanence to the Soviet Union’s external perimeter. But with the disintegration of the USSR into Russia and fourteen other independent states that situation ended.

      Russia itself felt vulnerable, and this vulnerability explains some – though not all – of the subsequent aggressive rhetoric and manoeuvring. Some twenty-five million ethnic Russians remained living outside the frontiers of the new Russian Federation after the winding up of the Soviet Union. For Russians this diaspora’s existence is both a reason and an excuse to claim the potential right to intervene in other former Soviet republics. On the other hand, the population of the Russian Federation is far from homogeneous: almost 20 per cent of the Federation’s inhabitants are non-Russian. The loyalties and aspirations of these non-Russian nationalities are among Russia’s least soluble problems.

      In facing