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13/04/2011 | Russia's Libya Strategy

Richard Weitz

The Russian government has effectively managed to balance its competing interests regarding Libya, despite having much less influence on events there than many other governments.

 

The Russian delegation to the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) voted to impose sanctions against Moammar Gadhafi's regime for its violent suppression of peaceful demonstrators, but abstained on the crucial March 17 vote authorizing the use of force to protect civilians from the Libyan government. Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said that Moscow could not support the resolution since it lacked clearly defined limits on using military force. 

After Western countries initiated wide-ranging military operations against Gadhafi's' troops, Russian officials complained that they were exceeding permissible levels of force. Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich further castigated Western governments for using the UNSC resolution to justify attacks against "nonmilitary" targets that caused dozens of civilian deaths. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that casualties caused by NATO's use of force were just as "unacceptable" as those committed by Gadhafi's forces. Lavrov also warned that Western military intervention risked fueling international terrorism. Russian officials are now urging Western governments not to arm the Libyan insurgents, a step Moscow argues exceeds what is permitted by the UNSC resolutions. 

Nevertheless, Russia has confined its objections to the West's war in Libya to the rhetorical plane. What explains Moscow's Libyan strategy? 

In general, Russia supports traditional interpretations of national sovereignty, which severely restrict the right of foreign powers or international organizations to intervene in a country's internal affairs. Russian officials therefore generally oppose applying, or threatening to employ, military force or sanctions to induce other governments to change their internal behavior. 

Furthermore, Russian leaders seek to create a multipolar international system in which the United Nations and international law dominate decision-making on all important questions, including the possible use of force. As permanent members of the UNSC, Russia can use its veto to prevent the United States and its allies from obtaining formal U.N. endorsement of any military operations they oppose. 

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's public objections to the intervention reflected this traditional logic. "The Security Council resolution is deficient and flawed; it allows everything and is reminiscent of a medieval call for a crusade," Putin told workers at a ballistic missile factory in the Urals region. "It effectively allows intervention in a sovereign state." Putin argued that Obama's foreign policy was comparable to his predecessors, recalling that Clinton used force in the former Yugoslavia and that the two Bush administrations engaged in wars against Iraq. "Now it's Libya's turn, under the pretext of protecting civilians," Putin added, citing the war to confirm the wisdom of strengthening Russia's military capabilities. 

The Russian government formally supported a landmark 2005 U.N. resolution endorsing the "responsibility to protect" principle. But until now, Russian policymakers have objected to humanitarian interventions as inappropriate, considering them misleading justifications for Western military interventions against hostile governments. For weeks, however, President Dmitry Medvedev has been blaming the atrocities of the Gadhafi regime for causing the crisis. "Everything that is happening in Libya was caused by the outrageous behavior of the Libyan leadership and the crimes that were committed against its own people. This should not be forgotten, all the rest is the consequence."  

Medvedev called Putin's language "unacceptable," which led some observers to see the divergence as signifying a split in the ruling tandem. Another more likely explanation was that the two leaders were appealing to different audiences, as they have often done in the past. Whereas Medvedev's language appealed to Western and humanitarian audiences, Putin's rhetoric undoubtedly won sympathy among Arab and other non-Western audiences and their leaders. As prime minister, Putin also has the luxury of expressing himself without feeling constrained by Russian foreign policy objectives, since the Russian Constitution empowers the president to make foreign policy. 

Russia's decision not to veto the resolution was perhaps motivated by the desire to avoid being blamed for any resulting massacre. But the Kosovo and Iraq precedents made clear to Russian diplomats that Western countries could resort to force even without an authorizing UNSC resolution. Russian policymakers now typically try to prevent this scenario, which damages the U.N.'s authority and therefore Moscow's influence, by abstaining when the West appears determined to go ahead with intervention in any case. In so doing, Russian diplomats weigh the benefits Moscow might enjoy by blocking U.N. action against the need to sustain Western commitment to working within the U.N.

Neither do Russian officials want to alienate Middle Eastern regimes with whom they have cultivated valuable energy and other economic ties. But in this case, the fact that the Arab League and the African Union both supported the foreign military intervention made it easier to secure Russian acquiescence in the Security Council. Russian officials were subsequently able to play both sides of the fence by joining with other Arab and BRIC leaders who supported the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya but objected to the use of air strikes against ground targets. 

Like other countries, Russia will suffer some economic losses from the Libyan War. Russia's recently fired ambassador to Libya, Vladimir Chamov, opposed the intervention on these grounds, arguing that its negative impact on Russia's economic investments in Libya "can be considered a betrayal of Russia's interests." Russian companies have in fact invested hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and gas exploration in Libya, and Russian Railways was building a railway under a $3.1 billion contract. Russia could also lose about $4 billion in previously contracted arms exports to Libya due to the UNSC sanctions.  

Yet, whichever regime emerges victorious in Libya, it will seek to buy many inexpensive arms -- of the kind Russia specializes in -- to replace those lost in the recent conflict.  And the war has raised world oil prices, providing Moscow with a financial windfall

Moscow also did not want to strain ties with the key Western powers now that relations between Russia and NATO have recovered from the freeze that followed the August 2008 Russia-Georgia War. The rapprochement has yielded Moscow economic as well as security benefits, including improving Russia's prospects of joining the World Trade Organization and generating considerable transit income from NATO shipments through Russian territory to coalition forces in Afghanistan. Russia has followed a comparable strategy of abandoning various contracts with Iran in return for more-comprehensive, if less-tangible, benefits resulting from improved relationship with the West.

Russian leaders have made clear throughout the Libyan and other Middle Eastern crises that they would not use their own military forces in these situations and preferred if other foreign militaries also exercised comparable restraint. Instead, they called for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, without specifying which parties should participate in talks and what kinds of deal they might reach.  

On several occasions, Medvedev has reaffirmed Moscow's preferred position in the Middle East -- that of a well-positioned mediator which, unlike Western governments, is able to communicate with all parties. Russian diplomats have long used this position to justify retaining good ties with Hamas, considered by most Western governments as a terrorist group. Now Medvedev has noted that, despite Gadhafi's crimes, Russia had maintained diplomatic relations with his government.

More recently, the Russian Foreign Ministry has endorsed the mediation efforts led by the African Union and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Still, if a peace agreement is reached in Libya, Russian peacekeepers could conceivably deploy with those from Turkey, Germany, China and other fence-sitting states. Above all, Russia's balanced approach means that it will suffer few diplomatic costs no matter who wins the war.

**Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor. His weekly WPR column, Global Insights, appears every Tuesday.

World Politics Review (Estados Unidos)

 


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