#2
Moscow Times
December 28, 2001
The Ghost of Christmas Past
By Pavel Felgenhauer

A year ago, U.S.-Russian relations seemed to be going from bad to worse. There were tit-for-tat expulsions of alleged spies from Moscow and from Washington. The new U.S. President George W. Bush promised to abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russian officials responded by threatening to break out of all other existing arms control treaties, promising to put more nuclear warheads on existing warheads and so on.

Of course, everyone understood that Russia was not capable of financing a full-blown arms race with the West. But China officially supported Moscow's stand on ABM and NATO expansion, so a new Cold War-style confrontation between East and West seemed possible.

Last January, U.S. government officials leaked information to the press that Russia secretly had moved tactical nuclear weapons to the Kaliningrad region -- a small patch of Russian sovereign territory sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania on the shores of the Baltic. Moscow fiercely denied that there were any nuclear weapons in the area. President Vladimir Putin told journalists that the report was "rubbish."

Nukes in Kaliningrad were never conformed, and the story died away. But somehow the Russian denials did not sound convincing. The military did not, apparently, deploy nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, but was clearly running exercises to prepare for a swift deployment of nukes by air or by sea from St. Petersburg, in case the Baltic countries closed their air space to Russian military transport planes in the event of a NATO blockade and siege of Kaliningrad.

Ten years after the demise of the Soviet Union, Russian generals still see NATO and the United States as their main potential enemy. The chilly tension that was so evident only a year ago was seen in the defense community as ample proof that armed deterrence is the only valid policy in facing NATO and that battle plans on the Western theater (first of all in and around Kaliningrad and in the Barents-Norwegian seas) were still of utmost importance.

Kaliningrad, surrounded by NATO member Poland and NATO-hopeful Lithuania, was seen since the beginning of the 1990s as the most vulnerable point against which NATO could apply various forms of military pressure or a military-backed economic blockade without risking a global nuclear confrontation.

Russian military planners still believe that a conflict over human rights violations in Belarus, ruthlessly ruled by President Alexander Lukashenko, or Russian actions in the Caucasus could trigger a NATO military response: A full sea, land and air blockade of the Kaliningrad region and then an attack with stealth bombers and conventional cruise missiles on military bases in Kaliningrad, Belarus and the nuclear Northern Fleet exposed at its anchor bases near the Norwegian border in the Murmansk area. Russia would either have to start a global nuclear war it would probably lose and surely be annihilated, or surrender like Yugoslavia and accept Western (U.S.) domination.

All major military exercises the Defense Ministry has managed to run in the last 10 years followed basically the same scenario. The latest took place in August, several weeks before the Sept. 11 attack on America. In a joint air-defense exercise, Belarussian and Russian forces prepared to repel a NATO air offensive against Kaliningrad and Belarus, combined with a Taliban invasion of former Soviet Central Asia, tacitly supported by the United States.

Russian military chiefs (as many of their counterparts elsewhere) try to paint a world full of horrifying threats to extract as much defense money as possible. In the mid 1990s, a joint command under naval supervision was established in Kaliningrad, so all the forces could fight as the united garrison of a besieged fortress. It was also considered of paramount importance that tactical nukes be rushed into Kaliningrad before NATO closes in. The Kaliningrad garrison could use the nukes to fight its own local nuclear campaign that might not involve the rest of Russia.

Tactical nukes could also serve as a regional deterrent. But it's important that the warheads be rushed in at the last moment, so NATO could not destroy them in a surprise preventive strike. It is also important that the nukes not be deployed beforehand so as to prevent giving the West a pretext to attack Kaliningrad.

Last September, Russian strategic forces were preparing to launch an exercise that would involve bombers flying to the American coastline to mimic a cruise-missile attack on targets on the U.S. mainland. President Vladimir Putin called off the exercise at the last moment, because U.S. cities were already indeed hit from the air and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, was on edge.

Today it would appear the world has profoundly changed, but for the Russian military it's more or less the same. When the United States paused for several weeks in September before attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan and offered peace if Osama bin Laden was handed over, our generals muttered: Trickery.

Today the Talibs and other extremist forces have dissolved into an underground army in Afghanistan. Joint action by Russia, Iran and the United States has diminished the threat to Central Asia. But there are more and more signs that Russia and the West are backing competing "anti- Talib" factions, so Afghanistan in the future will most likely be (and to some extent already is) more a source of contention than a reason to unite.

Last week, on Dec. 17, when the Strategic Rocket Forces celebrated their 42nd anniversary, Russian generals actually toasted with glasses of vodka the health of Bush, who several days before had announced a unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. The toast went like this: "Comrade Bush made America's aggressive intentions obvious and as the ABM shield is built the threat will increase, so the future of our nuclear deterrent is secure for a generation at least."

When over a glass of vodka or wine in the last days before Christmas and New Year's, I tell Russian generals and members of Moscow's small foreign policy elite that the world has maybe truly changed, that Putin maybe is indeed serious about turning Russia into an integral part of the Euro-Atlantic community of nations and a trustworthy ally of the United States, that there will be no need anymore to maintain defenses against the West, most gaze in total disbelief. They shake their heads, some chuckle, some go ballistic and talk of betrayal.

Their Western counterparts also shake their heads in total disbelief: "Is Putin actually serious?" I don't know. Even if he is, it all hinges on just one man, a former KGB spy recruiter, whose word, apparently, should never be taken at face value.

Maybe those wise men in epaulets know better? For generation after generation the generals and diplomats of the Euro-Atlantic community (including Russia) have shown their ability to make nightmare scenarios come true.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

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