Washington Post - 01.18.2004

Washington Post

The Great Divide Over Putin

By Jim Hoagland

BRUSSELS -- The European Union, NATO and the U.S. military are all heading east to Russia's doorstep and into the zone of its deepest suspicions. Largely absent from the foreign policy chessboard in 2003, Russia returns as a problem for the West this year.

Geography is history in Europe. It is now also character. Leaders' responses to and assessments of President Vladimir Putin track very closely with their geographic distance from him. Putin also seems to calibrate his willingness to work with or against someone by that person's Zip code.

He has won the seemingly unshakable trust of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as Germany's Gerhard Schroeder and France's Jacques Chirac.

The egregious Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's billionaire prime minister, outdid himself in November when he stood beside Putin in Rome and shielded him from journalists' questions about documented Russian atrocities in Chechnya. The queries were "Western lies and fairy tales," the Italian leader said.

But farther east -- in the former Warsaw Pact nations and ex-Soviet republics that join the European Union and NATO in parallel expansions this spring -- distrust of Russia and of Putin in particular runs deep. The victory of Putin's allies in Duma elections in December, in which parties that advocated pro-Western foreign policies collapsed, has bolstered the fears of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Balts and others.

They believe that through design or incompetence, Russia is destabilizing its "near abroad" -- the fragile neighbors and former republics immediately to the east and south. Failing governments or chaotic conditions in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova or Georgia could trigger Russian intervention or even occupation and reabsorption, the Central Europeans fear.

In NATO's meetings and in hallways here, officials from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary quietly but constantly warn Western European and American officials that they are being taken in by Putin, the former KGB agent turned president.

This "New Europe" faction will be significantly reinforced in early April, when NATO will admit seven new members, including the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Balts escape from Russia's "near abroad," but bring along with them Russian minorities and other residual issues of empire on which Moscow will continue to poke and pry.

"NATO's 'near abroad' will soon overlap with Russia's 'near abroad,' " as the alliance frontier moves eastward, says Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the alliance's new secretary-general, who succeeded George Robertson on Jan. 1. "NATO-Russian relations will be high on our agenda this year," Scheffer told me.

The former Dutch foreign minister paid tribute to the smooth working relationship that Robertson established between NATO and the Kremlin. But Russia has quietly withdrawn its peacekeeping troops from Kosovo, ending the promising operational cooperation that had been established in that Balkan territory.

One month after the second round of NATO expansion concludes, the European Union will expand from 15 to 25 members. Europe's chief political body has already been the target of Putin's suspicions and ire in negotiations over access to Russia's Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad and other subjects. The Kremlin routinely circumvents the Brussels-based union to deal with the national leaders Putin has dazzled.

There is no direct connection between the eastward institutional expansions by NATO and the EU and the coming redeployment of U.S. bases and troops in Europe. But the three movements all result from and complete the ending of the Cold War division of Europe. They are part of a new strategic environment that is unfamiliar and therefore threatening to the uniformed Russian military.

Polish officials stirred anxiety in Moscow last week by urging the United States to establish a major new air base and to station large numbers of troops in their country as part of the global redeployment that is now being planned in Washington. U.S. officials quickly reminded both Poles and Russians that the United States had promised not to establish major bases in Eastern Europe in return for Russian acquiescence to German reunification.

The U.S. plan in any event is to establish small "lily pad" installations in Eastern and Southern Europe so some units can be withdrawn from Germany and Italy and rotated in and out of the new facilities, which will be closer to the theaters of the global war on terrorism.

Understandable and in many ways admirable, the anger and suspicion that many in Central and Eastern Europe still feel toward their former oppressors are too visceral to be reliable guides for policy toward Putin's Russia. But these reservations cannot be totally dismissed. The Zip codes of two now-competing "near abroads" lie in unsettled territory.