MOSCOW: Fear of losing face at home a year before seeking re-election may lie behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to embark on a fresh and risky standoff with Washington over Iraq, analysts said on Wednesday.
Putin, who jeopardised his close partnership with US President George W. Bush by opposing the war on Iraq but who has escaped relatively lightly in the post-war fall-out, on Tuesday surprisingly set the stage for another international row — this time over the issue of UN sanctions on Iraq.
In talks outside Moscow with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the US main ally on Iraq, Putin rejected their calls for a quick end to UN sanctions against Baghdad.
Sending Blair back to London empty-handed, the Kremlin leader said United Nations sanctions could be removed only after arms inspectors had established the truth about alleged Iraqi stocks of banned weapons.
“Sanctions were imposed on Iraq on the basis of suspicions that it held weapons of mass destruction. Sanctions can only be removed if there is no suspicion and it is only the (UN) Security Council that can remove these sanctions because it imposed them in the first place,” he said.
The United States is planning moves at the UN to end the sanctions, imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and to start phasing out the UN oil-for-food programme.
But Putin said that far from wanting it to be phased out Moscow wanted the programme — in which Russian firms were very active players before the war — to be extended and kept under UN control.
At the root of Moscow’s concern is that once sanctions are lifted and the oil-for-food programme ended, the United Nations will no longer have any control over Iraq’s considerable oil sector.
Russia’s worst fears are that the Iraqi economy would then be controlled — for some time at least — by Washington and its war allies — and Russia would have to fight hard to defend its considerable oil industry interests in the region as well as recoup the $8 billion it is owed by Iraq from Soviet times.
HUMILIATED BY WASHINGTON: But analysts said that after being humiliated and ignored by Washington in the run-up to the war on Iraq, Putin, who will seek a new, four-year term in office in March 2004, had no choice but to take a tough stance on the lifting of sanctions.
They said Bush has little to offer Putin now and there is no real reason for the Kremlin leader to compromise himself at home.
“Putin spent two years crafting his partnership with Bush and he made some serious concessions, many of which he has not been forgiven for. Then at the moment of crisis he was simply disregarded,” said Viktor Kremenyuk, deputy director of the Moscow-based USA.-Canada Research Institute.
“On the eve of elections it is not a good position to be in. So, this display of force is not so much for the Americans but for voters at home,” Kremenyuk added.
Putin’s tough stance, which sets him on a new collision course with the Bush administration, was the more surprising since Washington signalled that it sees France as the real villain of the anti-war camp rather than Russia.
Bush, in a television interview on April 24, made clear it was France that was likely to be on the receiving end of US post-war displeasure. French President Jacques Chirac, Bush said, would not be “coming to the ranch any time soon”.
Whether Putin will get his name again into the visitors’ book at Bush’s Texas ranch in Crawford — he went there in November 2001 when his friendship with Bush was just budding — still remains to be seen. A possible new confrontation comes at an untimely moment for Putin who at the end of May is hoping to attract Bush, Blair, Chirac and other world leaders to glittering festivities in his hometown St Petersburg to mark the 300th anniversary of the old tsarist capital.
He would not want the birthday party to become a bear-pit.
UN LEVERAGE: Ironically, in early 2001 Russia found itself in the position of pressing for the sanctions to be relaxed, saying they mainly harmed Iraq’s civilian population.
At the time Russia proposed sanctions be suspended if Iraq agreed to allow a resumption of inspections to ensure it held no banned weapons.
A permanent member of the Security Council with the power of veto, Russia prizes the authority of the UN which is one of the few bodies where Moscow retains some of its former superpower clout and can exert leverage on Washington.
After the buffeting the world body sustained in being by-passed by Washington in the decision to go to war, Russia is keen to see a central role restored to the UN in settling Iraq’s future.
“Putin made a show of Russia’s position over sanctions because at the moment it is the only leverage Russia has over the United States. Russia’s plan is to force the United States to return to the Security Council where Russia’s role is crucial,” Kremenyuk said.
“Relations with the US will remain vague for the time being. Putin will only lose from any knee-jerk moves. He is entering the election phase and that overrides everything,” he added.—Reuters
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