Analysis: Russia and US face tough negotiations

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-11 16:08

MOSCOW -- This is a critical year for Russia-US relations, with the former Cold War adversaries trying to resolve conflicts ranging from Washington's plan for interceptor missiles in Europe to Russia's push for military bases in two separatist provinces of Georgia.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, background center, heads the meeting on military issues at the Gorki presidential residence outside Moscow on Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2009. [Agencies]

Despite a new US administration and some soft words between Moscow and Washington in recent days, progress is likely to come slowly, if at all.

The going will be tough even when both share similar interests - such as in limiting Iran's nuclear ambitions and in the US-led war in Afghanistan, where both fear a resurgence by the Islamic militants of the Taliban.

At a weekend security conference in Munich, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, a noted Kremlin hawk, praised Washington as ready to "resume the Russian and US dialogue frankly and openly." He commented after Vice President Joe Biden said that "it's time to press the reset button" on US-Russia relations.

The sweet words come at a time of soured relations. Both sides are deeply divided over a number of issues, especially one - Russia's effort to use its military, diplomatic and economic muscle to re-establish its influence over former vassal states in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine and eastern Europe.

This ambition, some analysts argue, helped trigger Russia's August invasion of Georgia, Moscow's cutoff of natural gas piped across Ukraine to Europe and what many see as the Kremlin's hand behind a move to evict a key US military base from Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.

Andrew Kuchins, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, thinks there is a "reasonable possibility we can reverse the negative momentum in the US-Russia relationship."

Partly, that's because of the miserable state of that relationship. "We went about as low as we could go in the fall of 2008," Kuchins said.

The most difficult issue is likely to be how the US handles the Kremlin's campaign to reclaim its former sphere of influence.

Biden rejected that effort in Munich on Saturday, a day after Moscow granted Kyrgyzstan more than $2.1 billion in loans and aid - and the former Soviet republic immediately announced it would evict the US from an airfield near Bishkek. The base supports US operations in Afghanistan.

In another area, the Kremlin said Tuesday that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is "ready for thorough joint work" with Washington on nuclear disarmament, noting US President Barack Obama's call for Washington and Moscow to "lead the way" in reducing the global nuclear threat.

Hopes for a new treaty limiting nuclear weapons have been higher because Obama seems sympathetic to Moscow's call for a strong verification system, something that got a cool reception from the Bush administration.

But Vladimir Dvorkin, a retired Russian general who took part in Cold War-era arms control talks with the United States, predicts the nuclear negotiations expected to begin in a few months will have only a 50-50 chance of succeeding.

"The talks will be quite difficult," he said, adding that mutual distrust may be too deep to overcome.

Alexander Golts, an independent military analyst, wrote in a commentary for the magazine Yezhednevny Zhurnal that as soon as the Obama administration proposed accelerating the nuclear arms talks, Russia began making new demands.

Golts noted that while in Munich, Ivanov suggested that the US and Russia should agree to stop deploying nuclear arms outside their territories and ban space-based weapons.

"By putting forward these conditions, Russia wants to drag out these talks for many years to come," Golts said, saying it seeks to distract the West from Russia's questionable human rights record.

James F. Collins of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, who served as ambassador to Russia in 1997-2001, said he is relatively optimistic about chances for a US-Russia deal on cuts in nuclear arsenals.

"Fundamentally the two big nuclear powers have a long history and an understanding of each other on this subject," he said. "We will be plowing a lot of well-known ground."

And no matter the issue, several experts said, talks between US and Russia will be a hard slog because they always have been.