Russia. A History

Substantive differences fuelled the rancour and rhetoric. One was Moscow’s concern about American expansionism, especially in ‘post-Soviet space’—the former Soviet republics and Russia’s neighbours. Above all, Putin opposed Washington’s campaign to promote pro-Western democracy by financing the ‘colour revolutions’, bringing to power regimes which would not only replicate Western democracy but also ally with the West against Moscow. American intervention succeeded in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, where support (monetary, not merely rhetorical) for ‘democratic forces’ helped to topple current governments and install pro-Western regimes. It was precisely this foreign intervention that provoked the 2006 decision to regulate NGOs that relied on Western, official or private, financing.

A second flashpoint of contention was the Middle East. Russia deemed the American military attack on Iraq an unjustified, illegal violation of the UN Charter. Putin emphasized that the Americans had failed to find weapons of mass destruction—the putative reason for launching a military invasion without authorization from the UN Security Council. Iran was another bone of contention. The West, led by Washington, accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons and insisted on harsh sanctions to prevent the ‘nuclearization’ of Iran. Moscow, however, resisted such demands and refused to cancel its contract to build a nuclear plant at Bushehr (ostensibly for peaceful purposes). It also reportedly sold sophisticated anti-aircraft battery units to Iran, which severely complicated American and Israeli threats to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.

A third issue was disarmament and nuclear deterrence. The dispute erupted at the very beginning of the Bush presidency, when Washington decided unilaterally to renounce the ABM treaty of 1972—which limited each side to a single missile defence system—and to resume development of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’, the National Missile Defence (NMD) system, initially in North America, but later in Europe as well. The NMD in Europe was purportedly intended to neutralize a potential Iranian or North Korean missile threat by positioning a missile defence unit in Poland and an advanced radar system in the Czech Republic. Russia vehemently objected, suspecting that the real objective was to neutralize Russia’s own nuclear deterrence. Given the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Moscow’s argument did not seem very compelling; no doubt more weighty were other considerations, especially the fear that NMD would generate new technological spin-offs (to Russia’s disadvantage) and strengthen America’s strategic superiority. The Putin government also realized that NMD would unleash a new arms race (forcing Russia to undertake a costly modernization of its own nuclear defence system), which was most unwelcome at a point when Moscow sought to limit military expenditures in order to concentrate on economic development and diversification. Another thorny issue was the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) between NATO and the Warsaw Pact Countries, which limited the size and deployment of military forces along the borders of Western states and the Soviet bloc. That agreement had been revised in 1999 (to account for the break-up of the USSR and Warsaw Pact), but the revised text gave rise to new disputes, with the result that only Russia and three close allies ratified the new text. Angered by the Western refusal to ratify the revised text, Russia formally withdrew from the CFE in December 2007, declaring that it could no longer tolerate a one-sided disarmament policy.