Eurasia Note #16 - Russia Firm On Ukraine

Germany's Greens try to link gas issue; Bidens' Kazakh cameo; Bosnia crisis next?

Jan 11, 2022

Ukraine and Germany’s Greens try to link gas pipeline and Donbas crisis
Russia says Ukraine is a discrete, military matter
U.S. says Russia exaggerates that almost all E. Europe is in NATO
Kazakh ‘coup’ over as Bidens play cameo role
Bosnia constitution in peril as its own Triple Entente falters

Tbilisi, Jan 11, 2022

The action on Ukraine was offstage. Talks between Russian and U.S. foreign ministries did little to build understanding on Monday. Russia refused to bargain, having set clear limits on Dec 17 to NATO’s expansion, and insisting the crisis in Ukraine is purely a military matter.

Ukraine tried hard to link the issue to gas — both its own energy shortage and the implications for western Europe. The former head of Naftogaz said Ukraine might “have to” siphon Russian gas from pipelines destined for Europe. [1]

Earlier the foreign minister of Germany minister, Annalena Baerbock, sought to inject the gas question, saying the Nord Stream 2 pipleline must be the first casualty of any conflict.

Neither gambit worked but nor did the U.S.-Russian talks achieve much. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken accused Russia before the talks of exaggerating any threat from Ukraine and indulging in “gaslighting”. Russia’s Washington embassy rejected claims from the White House press service of “disinformation”.

Russia has said no more eastward expansion of NATO, no membership for Ukraine and no heavy offensive weapons to be placed there — a mere five-minute missile cruise from Moscow.

Monday’s eight hours of talks in Geneva ended without any plans for a followup. The U.S. wants Russia to stop massing troops within the Russian border with Ukraine.

Eastward creep

Most of eastern Europe is in NATO. It’s easier to list those that are not: Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. At the Bucharest summit in April 2008, NATO agreed the latter two would join at some point in the future but without a timetable. Moldova has declared its neutrality, Kosovo is not univerally recognised as a country and Belarus is part of the Union State with Russia.

In the 1990s Russia collapsed, economically and in terms of population. NATO took the opportunity to forget verbal assurances to the contrary and signed up former Warsaw Pact members. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland joined in 1999; five years later Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia; in 2009 Albania and Croatia; in 2017 Montenegro; in 2020 Northern Macedonia.

On January 12, a meeting of the Russia-NATO Council will be held in Brussels and the OSCE Permanent Council will gather in Vienna the next day.

Same but different

Germany’s Green party is, of course, against the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and would prefer to drive Europe’s industrial manufacturing colossus by sunshine and a favourable breeze.

“Everything is possible” is the slogan of Baerbock’s party, washed in the sea-green Atlanticist tradition, with a hint of NATO sky blue. They back a stronger federal Europe as a bulwark against the East whom they readily criticize, eagerly supporting any oppositionist in Belarus, Russia or China.

Same but different, is what they call this in Hollywood: a new face and a familiar storyline. Can the Greens, with Democrats, Social and Free, revive federal Europe in the face of a fuel crisis, by the power of sun and wind energy, while holding NATO together or even building a replacement European military power — stronger state, digital everything, under EU and rainbow flags?

German business long ago settled on a more boring, less colourful script: it sees its destiny to the east, from were Russia can supply energy and, with the profits, buy German goods.

Wait too long and gas will find customers elsewhere. Russia and China are discussing the Power of Siberia-2 pipeline through Mongolia with a capacity up to 50 billion cu. meters annually — more than double the first such pipeline that launched in 2019. [2]

Blink 'n you’ll see it

The U.S. Secretary of State is strangely appropriate to the task. When he’s not on the National Security Council or in the State Department he runs a private equity firm and sells corporate advice to many of the corporations active in Central Asia.

In Moscow he’s practically family, his stepfather Samuel Pisar having been longtime lawyer and confidant to Robert Maxwell, reputedly a triple agent of Britain’s SIS, Israel’s Mossad and Russia’s KGB — whose daughters, including Ghislaine, carry the torch. Pisar, who died in 2015, was also Jeffrey Epstein's contact in Paris for many years, listed on page 87 of Epstein’s address book as the contact to “Ranch".

If anyone ought to be able to finesse the Russians, it’s Blinken.

Kazakh coup fails

Calling it an attempted coup, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev says the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s troops will complete their withdrawal in a little over 10 days.

He repeated the charge that some security and law enforcement agencies had not “stayed loyal to their duty” and that in several cities the counter-intellingence service, the National Security Committee, KNB, had abandoned not just its post but its buildings.

Former head Karim Masimov is under arrest, facing treason charges. On Monday a KNB Colonel Azamat Ibrayev was found dead at home.

Several journalists reportedly have been arrested including Altaynews.kz website editor Daryn Nursapar.

Tokayev told the president of the European Council Charles Michel: "I have no doubt that it was a terrorist attack. A well-organized and prepared act of aggression against Kazakhstan with the participation of foreign militants is mainly from Central Asian countries, including Afghanistan. There were also militants from the Middle East."

Numbers are still unreliable. Having claimed as many as 20,000 terrorists, so far officials have detained just over 1,000 (some estimates go as high as 5,000) with fewer than 200 deaths and a mere 31 weapons.

Biden time

As the press reminded us at the weekend, there’s no Eastern European or Central Asian country so obscure that you won’t find a Biden — and sure enough a photograph emerged of Joe and Hunter in 2014 with none other than former Kazakh prime minister and since-arrested intelligence chief Masimov.

What strange times we live in that it should be considered a drawback to be on personal terms with a U.S. president. And with Chevron in the country and Victoria Nuland as Under Secretary of State — it’s beginning to feel a lot like old times but that’s probably our memory playing tricks.

There isn’t space nor patience enough to detail a fraction of the wheeler dealing that involves Kazakh businessmen buying Prince Andrew’s Sunningdale mansion for millions over the market rate; financing U.S. special presidential envoy John Kerry’s daughter’s film-making career; or seeking Hunter Biden’s help to transfer wealth from Kazakhstan to U.S. investments.

That was the old regime, of Nursultan Nazarbayev, with whom Prince Andrew went goosing, or goose shooting. The faces have changed. Though it’s likely the money will keep talking. [3]

Meanwhile about 300 Kazakhs are stuck in Georgia, the country. Some have run out of funds and cannot afford PCR tests, let alone plane tickets.

Bosnia next

Another country with internal fractures is Bosnia. The leader of the country’s Serbs, Milorad Dodik, wants greater protections and rights — and says they should be ceded by the state, which also represents Muslim Bosniak and Bosnian Croat populations. In Dec 2021 the parliament of the Serb Republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina voted to seize powers from the state level.

These include changes to Bosnia's tax system, judiciary and army. The European Union High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Christian Schmidt fears this could tear up the agreement that settled the war of the former Yugoslavia in 1995.

On Jan 5, the U.S. put sanctions on Dodik. The Treasury Department said: “Milorad Dodik's destabilizing corrupt activities and attempts to dismantle the Dayton Peace Accords, motivated by his own self-interest, threaten the stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the entire region." [4]

The U.S. blames Russia and Serbia for trying to splinter Bosnia and Herzegovina but that’s not the only cause of the country’s fracture. Bosniaks and Croats are split by an electoral dispute in the run up to Oct 2022 national elections. Croats want a district in which they are a majority so that the Croat representative is supported, not effectively appointed. [5]

One topic that inflamed Serb passions was a law on genocide denial, imposed by former High Representative Valentin Inzko. Serbs and many outsiders question accounts of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

Dodik, as Republika Srpska’s most prominent political leader, responded by rejecting all laws passed by high representatives and threatened to create the republic’s own judiciary, along with tax authority, army and border police.

An external power vaccum leaves the gates to crisis wide open. The U.S. has other fish to fry. The EU has little sway other than nebulous offers of future accession — its greatest card is that accession negotiations are underway with Serbia, which absorbing Republika Srpska would jeopardise.

Russia has always looked grimly on the West’s handling of the Balkans and opposes the continued role of viceroy, or High Representative.

A constitutional congress is one option, provided the country can limp to Oct 2022 elections. Then perhaps some new Triple Entente or other mechanims… so reminiscent of the world before 1914.

Few people still credit that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the genuine cause of WW1 but it is a strange echo of history that in 2014 Dodik should have unveiled a statue to Gavrilo Princip: “His shot was a prelude to something for which some Europeans had prepared for years, and Serbs came out of that war as winners,” he said. [6]

There is no doubt that small but ancient nations found themselves repressed and carved by empires, and sought to extricate themselves. The problem is we keep making the same mistakes, war after war.

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