Moscow, Minsk to build air def in response to US missiles in Europe
20.08.2008, 21.51
By Itar-Tass World Service writer Lyudmila Alexandrova
Creation of a common air defense system of Russia and Belarus may prove the retaliatory measure the deployment of US missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic may entail.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Belarussian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko on Tuesday agreed that a treaty to this effect should be signed as early as this autumn.
Analysts say that Lukashenko at that meeting corrected some of his own mistakes. Whereas during the Russian peacemaking intervention in South Ossetia Minsk – nominally Moscow’s number one political ally – kept quiet, now, having received an unequivocal reprimand from Moscow, it hurried to present apologies.
Earlier, Lukashenko, who will be faced with no easy parliamentary elections in October, was trying to ‘build bridges’ to the West, and the Belarussian prime minister had a very cool reception by his Russian counterpart.
Analysts see a number of reasons for the change in Minsk’s position, including this one. The latest events have shown that Moscow is determined to play the key role in the post-Soviet space, and in doing so it will care little about the opinion of the “international community”, so-called.
Lukashenko on Tuesday at last expressed his attitude to the operation in South Ossetia. In the most flattering fashion he approved of Russia’s intervention.
“Everything was done excellently, very calmly, wisely and neatly. In a situation like this the West would act in a way that would cause the whole world to shudder,” he said.
“This belated approval of Russia’s actions by the Belarussian president looked so clumsy and out of place, that Dmitry Medvedev could not but at least feel regret all this happened in front of the cameras,” says the daily Vremya Novostei.
This meeting of the Russian and Belarussian leaders had been scheduled long before the peacemaking operation in South Ossetia, but the war in the Caucasus caused some major amendments to Russian-Belarussian relations, says the daily Kommersant. Moscow was very angry Minsk did not hurry to express solidarity with its line of action towards Georgia.
On the fifth day of the operation the Kremlin decided it was enough. The Russian ambassador to Belarus, Alexander Surikov, said, “It is not very clear to us why the Belarussian authorities modestly keep quiet.”
“One should be more explicit in expressing attitude to issues,” he said.
The ambassador’s angry message coincided with Alexander Lukashenko’s instruction to his foreign minister to take steps to better relations with the European Union and the United States.
“It looks like that move heated Moscow’s anger to the boiling point,” says the daily. “In those days there was much speculation around the world about the creation of a ’sanitary cordon’ of unfriendly states along Russia’s western borders – from Estonia to Georgia. Belarus could be regarded by Moscow as the sole breach in that cordon. Now it suddenly turned out that the breach is very doubtful. Moscow demanded from Minsk an absolutely clear expression of its position.
Lukashenko, although after a certain delay, used his chance. He fully backed Russia’s actions in Georgia and agreed to the creation of a common, unified air defense system with Russia.
Russian presidential aide Sergei Prikhodko said the two heads of state had agreed that an interstate agreement concerning a unified common air defense system should be finalized by the forthcoming session of the Supreme Council of the Union State, due in the autumn. The document is to be ready for signature at the session.
Analysts have assessed the results of the talks in positive terms, particularly so against the backdrop of the preceding meeting of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Belarussian counterpart Sergei Sidorsky. The Belarussian prime minister, recalls the daily Gazeta, failed to persuade Russia to either reduce the price of gas in 2009, or to extend a long-term two-billion-dollar loan. In response to this refusal of economic assistance Belarus released from prison the Opposition’s leader, Alexander Kozulin, something the United States and the European Union had long pressed for.
“Whereas until last Tuesday Lukashenko’s attitude to the conflict in South Ossetia had been very reserved, now it has become obvious that the Belarussian leadership had strongly misjudged the situation. Now it has realized that a conflict with Russia would be far more dangerous,” the deputy director of the Political Technologies Center, Alexei Makarkin, told the daily Gazeta. “Now that Medvedev has negotiated the deployment of air defense weapons in the territory of a neighboring country in response to a similar agreement between Poland and the United States, Lukashenko will probably manage to achieve consensus over gas.”
Ambassador Alexander Surikov in early August said the military did not rule out the possibility Russian missile launchers Iskander and strategic bombers may be based in Belarus. The on-line daily Vzglyad says that in that case Russian missiles would be able to reach the interceptor missile base in Poland, although the Czech radar would still remain outside their range of action.
Political scientists believe that the CIS countries’ reserved reaction to Russia’s operation in Georgia merely indicates that both pro-Russian and pro-Western elites in the former Soviet republics have for years had to walk the tight rope between Russia and the West, securing benefits from their rivalry in the post-Soviet space.
In the early 2000s Russia stepped up pressures on the entire structure of relations that emerged in the region in the 1990s, says senior lecturer of at the world politics department of the Higher School of Economics, Andrei Suzdaltsev, in an article published on the Politcom.ru website. That previous structure took shape under the tremendous influence of the European Union, NATO and the United States.
“Naturally, that structure gave in to the pressures, the colored revolutions, the gas wars and a pile of other problems being the net effect. But the South Ossetian conflict has now made it clear that Russia will run the show. The CIS countries feel scared, because they for so long remained sandwiched between two rivals contesting influence in the post-Soviet space, Russia and the West.”
