Staunton, September 30 – In the final decade of the Cold War, experts in both Moscow and the West routinely pointed to an arc of instability surrounding the USSR from the anti-communist movements in Eastern Europe to revolutions in the Middle East to the war in Afghanistan as a threat to the Soviet system.
Now, given developments in Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus and Khabarovsk, Moscow again faces an arc of instability but one far closer to the Russian capital than were those earlier developments, according to Moscow commentator Maksim Kalashnikov and his colleagues (vpk-news.ru/articles/58849).
In the current issue of the influential Voyenno-Promyshlenny Kuryer, Kalashnikov, Sergey Kostin and Artur Nesviyarzhsky argue that what was disturbing in the period between 1981 and 1987 has returned “but now everything is much closer” and therefore of even greater impact on Russia and concern to its rulers.
The reigniting of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan is only the latest sign of this trend, they say. “That’s bad news for the Russian Federation,” they warn Vladimir Putin because “just as in the 1980s, the country is surrounded by an arc of wars and conflicts.” They may now be beyond Russia’s borders but “they are much closer to Moscow.”
“It remains only to hope that Moscow will display titanic efforts in diplomacy and extinguish the war that has begun in the southern Caucasus” before Azerbaijan bombs the Metsamor atomic power station and spreads radiation across the region or Armenia bomb the Minchegaur reservoir dam and sends “a tsunami” through Azeri cities.
The Karabakh dispute has not easy solution. Under international law, Azerbaijan has every right to use force to reclaim its territories now occupied by Armenians, Kalashnikov and his colleagues say; but Armenia cannot allow that because if any government in Yerevan did, it would immediately collapse.
And what makes the latest outbreak of violence more serious, they write, is that unlike in 1994, the two sides are not relying on outdated Soviet weaponry but on modern equipment supplied to both sides by Moscow and some others as well. But Moscow has to make the effort to stop the war before Turkey or Iran or the West gets involved.
Turkey’s involvement could prove especially deleterious for the Russian side: Ankara could close the straits, it could block pipelines, and it could interfere with Moscow’s north-south projects. The other countries could also create problems. As a result, the Kremlin cannot avoid getting involved and involved with the goal of stopping the fighting as soon as possible.
“In contrast to Boris the Drunken (Yeltsin) in 1994, Putin has a military base in Armenia.” But it also has problems in Belarus, in the not quite frozen conflict in Ukraine and in its foreign adventures in Syria and Libya. It even faces problems in its client state of South Ossetia. All these things require attention to and limit the Kremlin’s options.
What Moscow will do remains unclear, but the parallels with 1981-1987 are obvious “when the United Staes undermined the forces of the Soviet Union … with an arc of instability and conflict.” After all, it was at that time, at the end of 1987, that the Karabakh conflict began,” the three analysts say.
The situation for Moscow today would not be as difficult and dangerous if Putin had not pursued the policies he did in Ukraine in 2014-2015. That enormous “geopolitical miscalculation” has opened the way for the restoration of an arc “not simply of instability but of chaos and wars” and ones far closer to Moscow than the earlier ones were.
“Instead of Warsaw, Minsk; in the role of Afghanistan, the Donbass and Syria;” and now the Karabakh conflict has returned “with new force.” In this situation, the three say, one must ask, “Does Moscow have enough non-military tools to prevent a fire in the Transcaucasus?”
No comments:
Post a Comment