#11 - RW 10-29-04 - RW Home
Moscow Times
October 26, 2004
Incoherent Double-Dealing
By Pavel Felgenhauer

Security Council secretary Igor Ivanov has announced that the council is "developing a new national security concept," implying that the new concept is needed "not because the old one is bad, but because the security situation has changed."

The current security concept and the country's military doctrine were written during President Boris Yeltsin's last year in power and officially approved before Vladimir Putin's inauguration as president. During Putin's rule, no new official defense or security policy documents have been prepared or approved.

After the Dubrovka theater siege in October 2002 that left 130 hostages dead, Putin publicly called for a new national security concept to be quickly adopted. Some months later, government officials, including Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, told reporters that work on the new concept was proceeding. Then the progress reports stopped coming and the issue faded away -- until after the Beslan school attack, that is.

Ivanov has announced that, to develop the new concept, the Security Council plans to organize public discussions and round tables with political analysts and academics. This is a strong indication that not much progress was made on the concept and that the council's work must now begin again, more or less from scratch.

In 2001, Sergei Ivanov was moved from the post of council secretary to head the Defense Ministry, and former Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo took his place as council secretary. An insider described what happened next as a "pogrom." Rushailo replaced virtually the entire staff that served Ivanov and his predecessors with his former buddies from the special organized crime units he fostered as interior minister.

When Putin demanded a new security concept in 2002, the council did not have the staff capacity to draft such a complex document. So the Defense and Foreign ministries were named joint coordinators of the draft concept, but a final joint draft never materialized.

In the spring, Igor Ivanov replaced Rushailo as secretary of the Security Council. Now, after a new staff shakeup, he is having another go at drafting the concept he failed to produce as foreign minister. Defense Minister Ivanov will also be a major player in drafting the security concept. But given that the two Ivanovs failed last time, why should they do any better this time?

The absence of clear official security and defense policy guidelines almost five years after Putin took office is not exclusively the result of incompetence.

A year ago, Sergei Ivanov, with much fanfare, publicly presented a defense white paper that initially was heralded as a new military doctrine draft. The Constitution states that an official military doctrine is signed into law by the president, but Ivanov's white paper never achieved the legal status of anything more than a nonbinding presentation.

Putin's rhetoric for foreign consumption portrays Russia as a Western ally in the war against a common enemy: international Islamist terrorism.

Yet internal Kremlin rhetoric addressed to the military and security community is in essence anti-Western, depicting the West -- as Putin did publicly immediately after the Beslan tragedy -- as endorsing terrorists who "want to destroy Russia."

Duplicity in speech was followed by duplicity in actions. While the attack in Beslan was happening, a major Russian naval task force was deployed for exercises in the North Atlantic. It was somehow billed as an "antiterrorist" exercise, but in fact our Navy's flagship, the nuclear cruiser Pyotr Veliky, our only aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, support vessels and nuclear attack submarines were deployed to simulate the sinking of an U.S. carrier group.

The exercise was clearly intended primarily for internal political propaganda purposes: to show that Russia is back, big and strong, and sailing the waves. But the official media stayed strangely quiet as the exercise proceeded. Most likely the authorities figured that after the bloody Beslan debacle it would be counterproductive to trumpet the successes of an antiterrorist exercise in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. To brag openly about the real anti-American, anti-NATO nature of the deployment was equally inappropriate.

The Kremlin's constant double-dealing of trying to be with the West and against it at the same time thwarts attempts to formulate a comprehensive national defense and security policy. Even writing a coherent document seems to be an impossible job.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst based in Moscow.