MOSCOW: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is stepping up rhetoric against the United States as his campaign for the March 4 presidential election intensifies after the biggest protests against his rule.
The US “wants to control everything” and takes decisions unilaterally on key questions, Putin said on a campaign stop in the Siberian city of Tomsk, about 3,000 kilometres east ofMoscow. “Sometimes I get the impression the US doesn’t need allies, it needs vassals.”
Putin is seeking a new term in the Kremlin amid the biggest challenge to his 12-year rule after fraud allegations at parliamentary polls sparked mass protests. The Russian leader, who has repeatedly accused the U.S. of interfering in other countries’ affairs, said last week that reports by a state-owned Moscow radio station supported American interests.
“The No 1 reason Putin is doing this is elections,” said Jan Techau, director of the European Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels. “It’s pre-election sabre-rattling. This is vintage Putin.”
Putin’s remarks added to anti-American rhetoric after a senior member of his ruling United Russia party said on Tuesday that new U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is trying to fuel revolution by meeting opposition leaders.
Efforts to improve relations with the United States under the so-called “reset”’ policy of President Barack Obama were spearheaded by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who agreed in September to make way for Putin’s return in March 4 elections. Medvedev forecast that the disagreement between Russia and the U.S. over American plans to stationmissile-defense facilities in Europe would continue to bedevil relations and get much worse from 2018 to 2020.
“’Medvedev’s departure is significant to the extent that Putin has a specific attitude to American leaders: he doesn’t trust them,” Fyodor Lukyanov, an analyst at the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy in Moscow, said by phone. “The atmosphere will be less constructive.”
Russian-US relations suffered a setback last year when the two nations disagreed over the NATO military campaign that led to the overthrow of Libya’s Moammar Qadhafi and U.S.-led attempts to censure Syria at the United Nations for its crackdown on anti-government unrest, which Russia says is part of another attempt at regime change.
While the Obama administration has pledged to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Cold War-era law that barred favorable trade relations with the communist Soviet Union, American lawmakers have questioned annulling the measure and easing trade with Russia.
The administration aims to repeal the legislation this spring, McFaul said on the radio station Ekho Moskvy.
The U.S. and its allies say the missile-defense system is meant to protect against threats from outside Europe, such as Iran. Russia says the shield will blunt its nuclear capability and wants the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the U.S. to sign a binding treaty stating the system is not aimed at their defenses, something the Obama administration has refused to do.
Missile defense is “linked to the US desire to strengthen its position as the leader of the Western world,” Putin said. “That’s why they don’t want to cooperate on an equal basis, either with the Europeans or us.”
McFaul, who hosted Russian opposition activists at the U.S. embassy last week, said Obama sent him to Russia to pursue the “reset” policy, rejecting as “nonsense” the accusations that he’s trying to interfere in Russian domestic politics.
“The point of the reset isn’t to prepare a revolution,” McFaul said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper published on Wednesday.
Russian opposition groups, who accuse Putin’s party of inflating its vote in December’s parliamentary elections to about 50 per cent from 30 per cent, plan their next major protest on Feb 4, a month before the presidential vote.
McFaul, a former professor at Stanford University who was the top White House adviser on Russian affairs before taking up his current post, was pilloried last week on Russian state television as aiming to export revolution.
“We want to understand if we are dealing with a new concept of an ambassador’s role,” said Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian lower house of parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “Is he an ambassador to the Russian Federation or in part head of a non-commercial organisation promoting democracy?” Pushkov said.
A non-career diplomat, McFaul has been using Twitter and Livejournal to get out his message, and posted links to the blog of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“There obviously is a risk: the Russians can be pretty rough on ambassadors they disapprove of, as I know,” said Tony Brenton, British ambassador to Russia from 2004 to 2008, who was hounded by pro-Kremlin youth activists after attending an opposition conference.
“We and the U.S. have to be very careful,” Brenton said in a phone interview. “We can’t be backing the opposition because that would have counterproductive effects, but what we can legitimately do is insist that Russia observes its international commitments to run honest and fair elections, to allow freedom of the press and freedom of opposition.”
Putin, who was president from 2000-2008, before handing over to Medvedev for four years after serving the maximum two consecutive terms permitted by the constitution, needs to win more than half the vote for a first-round victory.
“The primary concern of the Russian elite is control of the political process,” said Techau. “Now they’re losing control of the political system and this kind of anti-US reaction shows just how nervous the Russian elite has become.”
By arrangement with Washington Post-Bloomberg News Service