April 01, 2008	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 23, 1429

MOSCOW: As President Vladimir Putin prepares to attend Nato’s summit there remains deep-seated suspicion of the alliance among the Russian public — not least visitors to Moscow’s Armed Forces Museum.

Taking a group of pupils around the museum devoted to Russian military might, history teacher Sergei Vorobyov declared that “Russia shouldn’t place any trust in the alliance and should never accept its promises.” “The Americans only look out for their own interests. One should never believe Nato,” said one of his pupils, Denis Iliin, 13, to an approving nod from his teacher.

As Nato prepares for its April 2 to 4 summit in Bucharest, Russian public opinion tends to echo the hostility of the 20th century Cold War, when the alliance was at the heart of a decades-long stand-off between the West and the Soviet Union.

The summit will be unusual for the attendance of Putin, who is preparing to leave office but is shortly to hand over to a successor, Dmitry Medvedev, equally opposed to the alliance’s further expansion.

Posing for a photograph in front of a Soviet tank on a bright spring day, 22-year-old Muscovite Elvira said she mainly worried about the intentions of Nato’s leading power, the United States, and US plans to place missile defences in the Czech Republic and Poland.

“I’m not afraid of Nato... at the moment. But there is something wrong in what the Americans say,” she said.

Ivan, an elderly visitor taking his grandson around the museum, was especially outraged by the applications of two ex-Soviet states, Georgia and Ukraine, to join the alliance. He detected a hidden agenda to secure new energy resources.

“Nato is very dangerous for Russia. It will approve membership for Ukraine and Georgia in order to secure its own energy interests,” he said.

Another pensioner, Valentina Guseva, said she was worried by the growing American presence at military bases encompassing not only Nato territory but also countries as far afield as Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.

“Today they are again threatening us with these bases,” she said.

Forty-eight-year-old courier Vladimir said that “Nato remains and will always remain our enemy.” “It’s thanks to the alliance that since the Soviet Union we haven’t been able to re-launch our agricultural sector and have had to spend everything on arms,” he said.

Judging from opinion polls such views are typical of the Russian public.

A poll conducted in April last year by the independent Levada centre found that 49 per cent of Russians thought their country was right to fear Nato.

Forty-two per cent thought that reconciliation with Nato would be against Russia’s interests, while 28 per cent disagreed with this view.

Alexei Levinson, an analyst with the Levada centre, said that public opinion had started to change in favour of Nato in the perestroika era of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, but that this had not been sustained.

“In the ideological vacuum that followed perestroika Russian society, left to its own devices, quickly returned to the Soviet siege mentality, with which it was psychologically more comfortable,” he said.

“The acronym Nato has therefore become a new synonym for ‘enemy’,” he said.

However he added that this did not mean Russia itself was becoming more militaristic, noting that in the 2007 opinion poll 57 percent said that Nato countries had nothing to fear from Russia.—AFP