The resurgent Bear

The establishment and strengthening of multi-lateral alliances such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), consisting of the former Soviet Central Asian Republics and China, is an important tool for Moscow in its efforts to counter what it sees as the encroachment of Western influence into the traditional spheres of Russian authority.

Russia has also increasingly aligned itself with China to form a bulwark against Western dominance of global affairs and has advanced this alliance through arms sales, joint war-games and by building pipelines to China to quench Beijing’s thirst for oil and gas.

Arms sales have been a favourite tactic of Moscow to curry favour and influence and Russia has, for example, provided large amounts of arms to Syria and Iran. In December 2005, Russia signed a contract with Iran to provide it with about 30 of the highly sophisticated TOR-M1 air-defence systems. In April 2005, Russia completed the sale of advanced anti-aircraft Igla missiles to Syria and was only dissuaded from selling its Iskander-E, 300km-range tactical missile to Damascus by strong American pressure.

Russia also sold large numbers of advanced anti-tank missiles to Syria and Iran during the 1990s, some of which were subsequently transferred to Hezbollah and used to deadly effect against Israeli soldiers and tanks in the Israel-Lebanon Conflict this year.

Further enhancing its reputation as arms supplier to the world’s tyrannical regimes, Russia sold 12 MiG-29 warplanes to Sudan in 2002, a country whose government has been complicit in the genocide of about 400,000 people in Sudan’s western province of Darfur.

Russian energy companies have also signed contracts for the development and exploitation of oil resources in Sudan and have agreed to increase “co-operation in the exploitation and development of oil and gas fields and the transportation, utilisation and sale of gas” in Iran.

In light of these commercial interests it is easy to see why Moscow has threatened to use its veto in the Security Council to block meaningful sanctions against Sudan which would seek to halt the ongoing ethnic-cleansing there, and against Iran to force it to cease its uranium enrichment program. Moscow’s US$1 billion contract to build Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor also clearly influenced this attitude.

Russia further advanced its confrontational foreign policy when Putin invited the Hamas top-brass for talks in Moscow in March 2006 after Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. This move from the Kremlin was yet another cynical attempt to underline the independence of Russian foreign policy from the US and the West and increase Russian influence in the Middle East.

Why else would a country, which has experienced the horrors of Islamist terrorism like the Beslan school massacre, court Hamas which has been one of the pioneers of the Islamic terrorist creed?

The recent spate of politically motivated killings of prominent Russian critics of Putin and the Chechen Wars, point to possible Kremlin connivance and testify to the government’s growing authoritarian nature. They also illustrate Moscow’s extreme sensitivity to criticism of its foreign policy and its unwillingness to brook dissent.

The poisoning and death of former KGB Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Litvinenko in November is just one in a series of assassinations of those who have drawn the Kremlin’s ire. The deaths of Litvinenko, Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov in April 2003 and Duma DeputyYuri Shchekochikhin in July of the same year are all linked by the fact these individuals had accused the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) of co-ordinating the Russian apartment bombings of 1999, which killed over 300 people, in order to give Russia a pretext for starting the second Chechen war.

The evidence relating to the key event supporting this allegation was sealed by the Duma for 75 years. The slaying of the prominent war-critic Anna Politkovskaya in October appears to offer similar testimony to Moscow’s ruthless attitude to its opponents.

Russia remains a formidable power in global affairs and Moscow is positioning itself at the nexus of an international movement to defy and oppose Western influence. It is clear that Russia is forging ahead with its plans to re-capture its former authority and that its malign influence is spreading out over much of Asia and beyond. What is not clear is if, and how, the West will try to rein in the resurgent Bear.