Good Analysis of Putin and Russia

Putin Calls Shots to Salve Old Wounds

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new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/world/europe/12putin.html

By ELLEN BARRY
Published: August 11, 2008
MOSCOW — Vladimir V. Putin, who came to office brooding over the wounds of a humiliated Russia, this week offered proof of its resurgence. So far, the West has been unable to check his thrust into Georgia. He is making decisions that could redraw the map of the Caucasus in Russia’s favor — or destroy relationships with Western powers that Russia once sought as strategic partners.

Alexei Druzhinin/Ria Novosti, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, second from left, Saturday in a visit to a field hospital in Vladikavkaz, Russia, at the bedside of a man wounded in South Ossetia.
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Times Topics: Vladimir V. Putin
Times Topics: Russia
If there were any doubts, the last week has confirmed that Mr. Putin, who became prime minister this spring after eight years as president, is running Russia, not his successor, President Dmitri A. Medvedev. And Mr. Putin is at last able to find relief from the insults that Russia endured after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“Georgia, in a way, is suffering for all that happened to Russia in the last 20 years,” said Alexander Rahr, a leading German foreign-policy scholar and a biographer of Mr. Putin’s.
With Russian troops poised on two fronts in Georgia, speculation abounds on what Mr. Putin really wants to do. He faces a range of options.
Russia could settle for annexing the enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — something its forces have largely accomplished. Kremlin authorities have also spoken of bringing Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, to a war crimes tribunal for what they say were attacks on civilians in Tskhinvali last week.
A further push might permanently disable the Georgian military. The most extreme option would be occupying Georgia, a country with a population of 4.4 million and a centuries-old distrust of Russia, where Western nations have long planned to run an important oil pipeline.
But while the West may see an aggressive Russia, Mr. Putin feels embattled and encircled, said Sergei Markov, the director of Moscow’s Institute for Political Studies, who has close relationships with officials in the Kremlin.
“Russia is in an extremely dangerous situation,” trapped between the obligation to protect Russian citizens and the risk of escalating into “a new cold war” with the United States, Dr. Markov said.
“Washington and the administration are playing an extremely dirty game,” he said. “They will show Putin as an occupier even if Putin is doing nothing.”
Mr. Putin and his surrogates have forcefully made the case that Russia does not plan to occupy Georgia but is acting only to defend its citizens.
In recent days, Mr. Putin has appeared on television with his sleeves rolled up, mingling with refugees on the border with South Ossetia — the very picture of a man of action.
By contrast, Mr. Medvedev is shown sitting at his desk in Moscow, giving ceremonial orders to the minister of defense.
“He is playing the game which is designed by Putin,” Mr. Rahr, who serves on the German Council on Foreign Relations, said of the new president.
Yulia L. Latynina, a frequent critic of Mr. Putin’s government, noted with amusement that on the eve of the conflict in Georgia, when President Bush and Mr. Putin were deep in conversation in Beijing at the start of the Olympics, Mr. Medvedev was taking a cruise on the Volga River.
“Now he can cruise the Volga for all the remaining years, or can go right to the Bahamas,” she wrote in Daily Magazine, a Russian Web site. “I must admit that for the first time in my life I felt admiration for the skill with which Vladimir Putin maintains his power.”
In 2000, Mr. Putin was elected president of a shaken, uncertain country. Selling off state companies to private investors had led to immense flight of capital. The economy was in shambles. But the bitterest pill of all was NATO’s expansion into Russia’s former sphere of influence.
Nothing highlighted this loss of face as much as Kosovo, where NATO helped an ethnic Albanian population wrest independence from Serbia. Russia has few allies closer than Serbia, and the 78-day American-led bombing campaign in 1999 seemed to drive home the message that a once-great power was impotent.
Mr. Putin was determined to change that. First, he reasserted state control over Russia’s natural resources companies, installing loyalists to run businesses like Yukos and punishing oligarchs who challenged his power.
With Russia then reshaped as a petro-state, flush with money from oil and natural gas, Mr. Putin has sent blunt messages to its neighbors: The flow of cheap energy can be turned off as well as on. Two years ago, after what was called the Orange Revolution swept West-friendly leaders to power in Ukraine, Russia briefly cut off the country’s flow of natural gas, sending waves of anxiety across Europe.
Now, with Russia’s swift progress in Georgia, Mr. Putin has asserted Russia’s might as a military force. Russian troops entered Senaki in western Georgia on Monday, and Moscow acknowledged for the first time that its forces had entered Georgian territory.
“I would say you have a situation in which the Russians have come to the red line,” said Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
In describing Mr. Putin, people often use the word “icy.” After the lurching presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Putin offered himself as a man in consummate control of his impulses. He does not drink liquor; he skips lunch; his great indulgence is judo.
Early in his presidency, he charmed his Western counterparts, coming across as an articulate and cosmopolitan leader. But there were always topics that brought out a different side of him.
As Mr. Yeltsin’s tough-guy prime minister, he made a stir by threatening Chechen guerrillas with gutter language: “If we catch them in the toilet, we’ll rub them out in the outhouse.”
In 2002, when a French reporter faulted Russia for killing innocent civilians in Chechnya, he suggested that if the reporter were so sympathetic to Muslims, he could arrange to have him circumcised. “I will recommend to conduct the operation so that nothing on you will grow again,” he said.
The prelude to the events in Georgia reveals Mr. Putin as both a careful actor and a visceral one. In the spring, when Western nations lined up to recognize a newly independent Kosovo, Mr. Putin answered by formally recognizing the two breakaway enclaves in Georgia.
Over the course of the last decade, the Russian government issued passports to virtually all residents of South Ossetia, a step that would become the justification for moving troops over the Georgian border. And last year, Russia suspended its compliance with the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which, among other things, required that it withdraw troops from Georgia and Moldova.
But emotions have flared up, sometimes unpredictably. Mr. Putin reserves a particular dislike for Mr. Saakashvili.
In April, when Mr. Putin decided to establish legal connections with the governments of the breakaway regions, the Georgian president called him and reminded him that Western leaders had made statements supporting Georgia’s position. Mr. Putin responded by telling him — in very crude terms — where he could put his statements.
“He has such a visceral attitude toward Saakashvili that that seems to drown out anything else that anyone says to him,” said a senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It may take time to work out the messages Mr. Putin has sent in the past week, but this one is clear: Russia insists on being seen as a great power. “The problem is, what kind of great power is emerging?” said Mr. Trenin, of the Carnegie Center. “Is this a great power that lives by the conventions of the world as it exists in the 21st century?”
C. J. Chivers contributed reporting.