As last week’s G-8 meeting in Germany vividly demonstrated, despite its (very real) woes, Russia now matters again. For two weeks, the world–in the form of everyone from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to emissaries from the United States, Germany and Greece–beat a path to Moscow’s door. The deal eventually struck in Germany–by which Moscow agreed to have its troops participate in any future peacekeeping arrangement in Kosovo–added momentum to the push for a diplomatic solution. For that achievement, Boris Yeltsin and his special envoy to the Balkans, former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, could legitimately take some credit. “Everyone underestimated how explosive the Russian reaction [to Kosovo] was going to be,” said one Western diplomat in Moscow last week. “Once it became apparent, it was obvious they were going to be players in this. They could not be ignored, and they were smart enough to know that.”
Whatever its eventual effect on a possible settlement with Milosevic, last week’s deal was important for what it revealed about Moscow politics. At the beginning of the war, the loudest voices in Moscow belonged to the communists and the nationalists–and they were screaming bloody murder. The government of Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, far from trying to cool emotions, initially only added to the cacophony. Igor Ivanov, Primakov’s handpicked successor as foreign minister, said publicly that it was NATO, not Milosevic, that was committing genocide in Yugoslavia; NATO’s leaders, Ivanov added, should be hauled before a war-crimes tribunal.
It’s a statement he still hasn’t retracted; but that was the same foreign minister seen last week grinning and shaking hands with six of NATO’s “war criminals” in Germany. Ivanov got from point A to point B for two reasons: first, Boris Yeltsin–despite his ailments, and as he has so often done in the past–rallied as crisis loomed. And second, Primakov, though not necessarily a friend of the West, has never been (and is not now) stupid.
Yeltsin does not want, in his last year in office, to preside over a serious rupture in Russia’s relations with the West. For all his failures as a president, his instincts tell him that Russia needs to be integrated with the Western democracies. Kremlin sources say Yeltsin does not listen to many people these days, but it is a fact that one person who still does have his ear is former economic czar Anatoly Chubais, who recently turned down a Yeltsin offer to return as his chief of staff. In the early days of the war, as the U.S. Embassy was besieged in Moscow and the air was full of cold-war rhetoric, it is highly likely that Chubais simply told Yeltsin to get a grip.
That Yeltsin did, by naming Chernomyrdin as his special envoy. The move showed the West, and Washington in particular, that it would be dealing with someone whom they have done business with in the past–“not a hothead,” as one Clinton administration official put it last week. But Chernomyrdin’s appointment also served Yeltsin well in his growing feud with Primakov–one that may yet end up in the prime minister’s dismissal–and with the communist-dominated Duma that supports him. Foreign affairs, of course, is Primakov’s beat. He is a former spymaster and foreign minister. The appointment of Chernomyrdin undercut him badly. “It was an obvious and deliberate affront,” as one foreign ministry source puts it. But if Primakov is fuming, he has at least not allowed his pique to get in the way of Chernomyrdin’s push to join NATO in trying to find a diplomatic solution.
That’s not surprising. For now Primakov remains prime minister. Given Moscow’s economic desperation–in particular its need for immediate debt relief from the IMF and then further loans starting next year–Primakov also knows that it is simply not in Russia’s interest to start Cold War II with the West over Kosovo. To make noises about a new cold war, maybe–especially if the West forks over its money to keep everyone calm. But to start one? Not a chance.
