#4 - JRL 7303
Washington Post
August 27, 2003
Russia Turns From Old Allies to U.S.
N. Korea Urged to Cooperate in Talks
By Peter Baker, Washington Post Foreign Service
For each of the previous two years, Russia has hosted the leader of North Korea on lavish railroad excursions fit for visiting royalty. This year, however, has brought no train trip for Kim Jong Il, only Russian warships floating off the coast of North Korea.
Russian armed forces are conducting an elaborate series of military exercises in the Far East, in part to prepare for any refugee crisis that might occur should North Korea's government collapse or become involved in a war with the United States. Officials in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, were so offended at the exercises that they angrily denounced them and refused to send observers.
The flap demonstrated that the North can no longer count on unstinting support from Moscow as it seeks to deflect international condemnation of its nuclear weapons program. Heading into the six-nation talks that open in Beijing on Wednesday, Russia has pushed its ally to find common ground with the United States and abandon its atomic ambitions. "The Korean Peninsula should be free from nuclear arms," Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said last week.
In backing away from the Stalinist government, Russia has underscored a broader diplomatic turn away from so-called rogue states since the war in Iraq as it seeks to rebuild its relationship with the United States.
Last summer Moscow seemed to go out of its way to court members of President Bush's "axis of evil," negotiating a $ 40 billion economic agreement with Iraq, proposing construction of five more nuclear reactors in Iran and opening its doors to Kim at a time when Washington wanted to isolate him.
A year later, the Kremlin is taking a more cooperative stance with the United States. In the past two months, Russian officials have abandoned talk of expanding their nuclear assistance to Iran and brought new pressure on that country to subject its nuclear program to strict international inspections. Russian diplomats have not led the charge against U.S. postwar Iraq policy at the United Nations. And they have teamed up with China to encourage recalcitrant North Korea to negotiate.
"The tide has certainly changed in Russia on foreign policy," said Dmitri Trenin, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. The transformation has happened "very quietly. It's very interesting. There has been no major statement, nobody has been sacked. But everybody is singing a different tune."
Senior policymakers describe it not as a change in substance, but in calibration. Mikhail Margelov, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin and chairman of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, attributed the new harmony to better coordination to avoid misunderstandings.
"Today we have much in common," he said in an interview. "What we have managed to achieve in the last few months, especially after the Iraqi crisis . . . [is] to establish a more efficient level of communications." After all, he added, "when it comes to Iran and when it comes to North Korea, definitely neither Russia nor the United States wants these countries to have the nuclear bomb."
Other officials and analysts see two imperatives behind the shift in Russia -- Moscow's fear of being shut out of major global decisions, as it was during the Iraq war, and its creeping realization that Iran and North Korea may actually pose a serious threat.
"Russia wants to be respected and seen as a country that could and should play a significant role in world issues," said U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a leading congressional figure on Russian relations, who was in the country today visiting a once-secret weapons-grade plutonium facility in the Siberian city of Zheleznogorsk. To encourage this, he said, Washington needs to reciprocate, and the first thing it should do is lift three-decade-old trade restrictions.
Even so, Russia's newfound cooperation may not fully satisfy Washington's demands. Moscow still refuses, for example, to give up its $ 800 million contract to finish a nuclear power facility at the Iranian port of Bushehr and has echoed North Korea's proposal that the United States promise not to attack the North as part of any settlement of the nuclear crisis. Washington has so far resisted giving such security guarantees.
Undersecretary of State John Bolton left Moscow today after talks with senior Russian officials on these issues. U.S. diplomats have been pushing Moscow to bring the issue of Iran's nuclear program to the United Nations, but Russian officials are still mulling their response.
For years, Russia has ignored or denied evidence that its scientists who went to Iran were helping it develop missiles and nuclear weapons. Yet a key moment in the evolution of Russia's attitude, according to officials on both sides, was the disclosure by Iranian opposition figures of the existence of two secret nuclear facilities in addition to Bushehr that could support a weapons development program.
Publicly, Russian officials shrugged it off. But Moscow has since pushed Iran to sign agreements obligating it to return to Russia all spent nuclear fuel from Bushehr and accept short-notice inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Russia conducted back-to-back talks here in Moscow with South Korean and North Korean officials and enlisted China's leadership in putting together this week's multiparty negotiations. The Far East military exercises, which also planned for what would happen if a North Korean vessel bearing a nuclear weapon had to be stopped, "were not a PR exercise," said Trenin. "I think they were damn serious."
Vasily Mikheyev, a former Russian diplomat who served in Pyongyang, said the Kremlin has found it easier to turn away from North Korea because it has only minor economic ties to its small neighbor. By contrast, the extensive oil interests in Iraq helped drive Russian opposition to the U.S. war there. Now that the war is over, Moscow wants to secure contracts for its oil companies.
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