By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Oct. 19, 2007

When President Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes in 2001 and perceived a trustworthy soul, it's unlikely that he foresaw the more recent image: a snarling Russian bear, engorged on petrodollars and fuming at past slights. Even as the former KGB colonel has tightened the vise on political opposition and press freedoms at home, and has hinted at a plan that would allow him to remain as Russia's leader, Putin has increasingly lashed out in the past year at the United States and its allies.

	Onetime 'soul mates' George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin are running out of time to halt a slide in U.S.-Russian relations.

"The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres -- economic, political, and humanitarian -- and has imposed itself on other states," Putin said in a speech last February at the Munich Conference on Security Policy. That speech, in which he accused American foreign policy of "lacking any kind of restraint," recalled similar red-hot rhetoric by Putin, who has equated the Bush administration with the Nazi Third Reich and characterized the demise of the Soviet empire as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

So piqued is Moscow at U.S. plans to station elements of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe that Putin has threatened to retarget nuclear weapons at Europe and to withdraw from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) in December. That would leave Russian troops free to stay in Georgia and Moldova, and in theory allow Moscow to once again deploy threatening forces west of the Ural Mountains. If Western nations follow through on their stated intentions to recognize Kosovo's independence in December -- assuming current negotiations with Russia's ally Serbia fail -- Moscow has signaled that it could do the same for breakaway regions of Georgia.

What concerns many experts is Russia's tendency to match the confrontational rhetoric with increasingly provocative actions. Last year Moscow cut off oil supplies to Europe in a dispute with one of its neighbors that many experts interpreted as "energy blackmail." The Kremlin has also cracked down on domestic human-rights groups and nongovernmental organizations that it derides as agents of the West.

Putin has pointedly refused to extradite a former KGB officer whom British authorities accuse of killing a Russian expatriate and British citizen in London with polonium-210, a rare and deadly radioactive poison. The strange case of Alexander Litvinenko, himself a former KGB officer who had broken with the Kremlin, fits in with a recurrent pattern of Putin's critics winding up either dead or in prison. These tactics remind many experts of Soviet spy craft in the darkest days of the Cold War. And by some reckonings Putin has now stocked two-thirds of the Kremlin hierarchy with former KGB colleagues.

This summer Putin also announced that for the first time since the end of the Cold War Russian strategic bombers resumed regular long-range combat patrols, which have brought them near Western forces and borders. In August a Russian-led team planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole, claiming it as sovereign territory, and Russian bombers launched cruise missiles during Arctic exercises. On an even more sinister note, after tensions rose this summer over Moscow's continued stationing of troops in the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia charged that a Russian warplane invaded its airspace and fired an anti-radar missile at a new Georgian mobile radar site.

Also in August, Russia and China, along with other members of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization -- sometimes called the "club of dictators" for its autocratic membership (China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) -- held the group's most ambitious war game ever, which included 6,500 troops and more than 100 aircraft. Meanwhile, Russia in recent months has tested new land- and sea-based intercontinental missiles and a vacuum bomb that Moscow called "the father of all [conventional] bombs." And Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov has announced a $200 billion military modernization program designed to replace half of Russia's military equipment by 2015.

Many experts fear that if something is not done to check Russian provocations and decisively halt the drift in U.S.-Russian relations, the risk of miscalculation and crisis will continue to grow and the legacy of the Bush-Putin years will be distrust and confrontation.

"There are certainly a lot of worrisome signs emanating from Russia that are reminiscent of the Cold War, though I'm fairly confident that they don't really want to get into another bipolar, global contest with the United States," said Andrew Kutchins, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "On the other hand, you can't overestimate the impact of the humiliations of the 1990s on the Russian psyche. That was especially true because the Russians always believed they were one of the great powers in the world, and as such should have been more respected."

Indeed, Russians widely look back on the chaos of the 1990s and the country's attempted transformation to a Western-style democracy after the Cold War as an unmitigated disaster. The decade included the breakup of the Soviet empire, a devaluation of the ruble, a debt default, and the plundering of state wealth by corrupt oligarchs.

During that same period the United States expanded NATO to Russia's borders, supported democratic revolutions in Russia's "near abroad," and most recently announced a U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe. The latter fueled the suspicion of many Russian elites that Washington is intent on unilaterally tipping the security balance in Eurasia in its favor. Putin has played on that sense of grievance to further solidify his power during campaigning for parliamentary elections.

"A lot of Putin's hot rhetoric and the military buildup in Russia are driven by internal politics in an election season, because it's a way for him and his people to assert themselves as tough guys," Pavel Podvig, a researcher at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and a former researcher at Moscow's Institute for Physics and Technology, told National Journal. Polls in Russia put Putin's approval rating near 80 percent, he notes, and his popularity indicates that the public likes to see him stand up to the West. "Russian generals and defense industry executives have also perfected this song and dance that they need this new missile, or airplane, or submarine to keep up with the United States. And now it's much harder for the Kremlin to argue that they don't have the money. So that whole cycle that propelled the arms race in the past is coming back."

James Collins was the U.S. ambassador to Russia in the 1990s, and he now directs the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "For quite a while now the United States and Russia have been talking about each other a lot, but not talking to one another, and there's been very little diplomatic activity to address the disputes on our agenda that might counter this sense that both nations are glaring at each other across a widening divide," he said. "With some tough deadlines on contentious issues coming up, I do worry that Bush and Putin are running out of time on their political clocks to turn things around."

Despite being consumed by ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration was sufficiently worried about the increasing chill in U.S.-Russian relations to send Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Moscow last week to hold rare "two-plus-two" meetings with their Russian counterparts. The mini-summit resulted from an inconclusive meeting between Bush and Putin in July at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, and its goal was to defuse potentially serious disputes on missile defense, Kosovo, the CFE Treaty, and a follow-on verification regime for nuclear arms reduction after the current one expires in 2009.

Administration sources concede, however, that the two-plus-two meetings resulted in no positive breakthroughs. On missile defense, U.S. negotiators are still hoping that a proposed joint U.S.-Russian assessment of the Iranian missile threat and offers to include Russia in a future anti-missile system will eventually allay Moscow's objections to the U.S. placing sites for the anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Although Russia "has gotten everyone's attention" by threatening to withdraw from the conventional-forces treaty in December, a senior administration source said, the hope is that some accommodation can still be reached and Moscow will back down.

Kosovo's drive for independence remains perhaps the most combustible, near-term issue on the U.S.-Russian agenda. Neither side shows any sign of backing down, and a December 10 deadline for the end of current negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo falls in the midst of a Russian election season, when demagoguery and brinkmanship play well to wounded Russian pride.

"There's no denying that we're coming to a difficult point on Kosovo, because it's pretty clear that the Kosovars are likely to proclaim independence some time after December 10, and we and a growing number of European countries are leaning toward recognizing Kosovo's independence because the issue of the Balkans cannot be kicked down the road forever," said a senior administration source who took part in the recent Moscow talks. Whether the Russians will react by recognizing the independence of Georgia's breakaway regions and potentially sparking a crisis on their own border, the official said, "is something that we do worry about, frankly, especially given that this is coming in the middle of a Russian election period."

Despite all the problems, administration officials argue that U.S.-Russian cooperation -- such as in nonproliferation and counter-terrorism -- is going on largely unnoticed. "I know it is conventional wisdom that U.S.-Russian relations are at their lowest point ever right now, and there's no question that we have difficult challenges on our plate, some of which are really hard to solve," the senior official said. "On the other hand, no one is huffing and puffing and walking away from the negotiating table. To the contrary, I think you'll see intensifying engagement on these issues in the coming months so that if problems erupt, as they inevitably will, we are in close contact with the Russians and able to manage the problems in such a way that they don't spin out of control."

Even Russia's much-vaunted military modernization may be less threatening than some of its bellicose rhetoric would indicate. With the country's gross domestic product having ballooned from just $200 billion in 1999 to $1.2 trillion in 2007, primarily because of rising oil and gas revenues, the roughly 2.7 percent of GDP that Russia devotes to its military certainly buys more weapons. Currently Russia spends an estimated $30 billion on its military annually, sixth highest in the world. Russian officials have also announced a separate $200 billion program designed to replace much of the nation's aging arsenal by 2015.

Despite that ambitious modernization program and reforms begun under Putin to transform the military into a more professional force, experts say that Russia faces high hurdles, especially in regard to its conventional forces.

"To be honest with you, I don't think the Russian army is an offensive, expeditionary threat anywhere," said a senior U.S. Army officer in European Command who recently participated in joint exercises with the Russians. Although Russian equipment is improving, he said, the military's leadership and training systems have made little progress since the days of the over-centralized Soviet behemoth. "The Russians don't invest in junior officers; they don't have a professional NCO corps; they still use analog systems and sticky acetate maps; they still focus on massed artillery instead of precision strike and hitting what they're shooting at; and their command structures are still very stove-piped in the old Soviet style," said the senior officer. "After working with them, I personally don't go to sleep worrying about the threat of Russia's conventional forces."

Russia's nuclear force is another matter. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian military doctrine has focused on strategic nuclear forces as the chief deterrent against attack or intimidation by another major power. As such, Russia still maintains the largest stockpile of nuclear warheads in the world -- some 15,000 -- and its forces boast 489 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 79 strategic bombers, and 12 operational Delta-class nuclear submarines, according to Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces.

"Russian security policy is all about prestige and economic benefits, and because the Russians see themselves as our equals in strategic nuclear forces they are focusing their modernization efforts there to try and maintain the prestige of that position," said Lowell Schwartz, an analyst with the Rand think tank who is working on a report on the Russian military. In terms of Russia transforming conventional forces into a more modern and professional military, Schwartz believes that will remain a much lower priority. "That corresponds with another interesting phenomenon, which is that despite the provocative rhetoric, Putin is actually very cautious about using Russian military forces outside of Russian borders," he said. "They understand that their conventional forces are inherently weak, and they've gotten smarter about using soft power such as oil resources to influence world events."

Where that leaves overall U.S.-Russian relations remains a topic of much discussion in both capitals. When Bush saw candor and trust reflected in Putin's eyes six years ago, America was an uncontested superpower and the Russian was in an acquiescent posture befitting the leader of a recently traumatized nation. Today, when U.S. officials approach the Kremlin, the glint in Putin's eye, and the body language of this old judo master, bespeak an altogether different reality.

"When they first met I think Bush did see in Putin a possible partner, but the relationship never really bore the fruit of those initial expectations," said William Pomeranz, deputy director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. "Bush got distracted by the global war on terror, and as Russia got wealthier and stronger, Putin steered it away from democracy. The relationship inevitably grew tenser. Now I really do think that Putin and Bush have one last chance to put relations back on solid footing, or else the harsh political rhetoric will eventually overwhelm the areas where we really need to work together."