PRISTINA GAMBIT PAYS OFF FOR RUSSIA Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit The Globe and Mail Monday, June 14, 1999 Analysis GAMBIT PAYS OFF FOR RUSSIA Russian peacekeepers could have "zone of responsibility" in Kosovo; won't serve under NATO's operational command. By Geoffrey York, Moscow Bureau Moscow -- Russia's unexpected military gamble in Kosovo has paid off. By sending troops into Kosovo and forcing the West to offer concessions, Moscow has gained a small but important victory for its muscle-flexing tactics. The victory was confirmed yesterday when U.S. officials abandoned their hard-line stance and conceded that Russian peacekeepers could have a "zone of responsibility" in Kosovo. Just a few days earlier, those same officials were confidently declaring that the Russians would not be allowed their own "sector." The West also seems willing to concede now that the Russian peacekeepers will not serve under the direct operational command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Russian military, by swiftly deploying 200 peacekeepers in Kosovo and grabbing control of the strategically significant Pristina airport before NATO troops could arrive, is sending a clear and dramatic message to the world. In the future, the Kremlin is saying, nobody should make any assumptions of Russian weakness. Negotiations to resolve the confrontation were continuing yesterday at the highest levels, including an hour-long phone conversation between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. But the Russian military gesture had already sent shock waves through Washington and other NATO capitals. The move jeopardizes the careful plans of the NATO peacekeeping effort in Kosovo. Only a few hours before the Russian peacekeepers stunned the West on Friday night by becoming the first foreign troops to enter Kosovo, the Russian foreign ministry had promised that the Russians would stay out. This pledge was soon broken. Then, after the Russian troops had entrenched themselves at Pristina airport on Saturday morning, Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov called it a mistake, and promised that the troops would be immediately withdrawn. Two days later, the Russians are still in Pristina, and there are rumours of further reinforcements arriving soon. Some NATO leaders were infuriated by the Russian move. Complaining of "disunity" in Moscow, they hinted that it could hurt Russia's chances of getting much-needed foreign aid. "I think there is a confusion in Moscow, which is not really good news for them -- especially on the eve of the G8 summit," George Robertson, British Secretary of State for Defence, said yesterday. In the United States, The Washington Post bitterly complained that Russia's secret deployment of troops in Kosovo had "cast doubt on its trustworthiness as a partner." But many Western observers failed to understand that the "disunity" in the Russian government is actually a Russian strength. It keeps its rivals off balance, allows greater flexibility and makes it easier for the Kremlin to test several options and pick a winning tactic from an array of choices. Equally important, the Kosovo move was a huge propaganda coup for the Kremlin. "Russia stole from NATO the victory in the Kosovo conflict," Russian NTV television proclaimed on the weekend. Many ordinary Russians were proud and pleased by Moscow's defiance of NATO. The gesture will defuse criticism from Russian opposition leaders, who said Moscow was too conciliatory in the negotiations in Belgrade to end the war. Many critics said the Kremlin had surrendered too much and failed to defend Yugoslavia's interests. The troop deployment into Kosovo showed two key realities of today's Russia. First, the Russian military is fragmented, hawkish and beyond the control of any single man. Even Russian defence minister Igor Sergeyev was surprised to learn that his own troops were heading into Kosovo on Friday night. The same confusion plagued the Russian military command structure in the Chechnya war of the mid-1990s, and in the ethnic hot spots of the Soviet Union's dying days. In both cases, Russian troops took aggressive actions without waiting for orders from the Kremlin. Second, the Kosovo gamble showed that Mr. Yeltsin is continuing to juggle an improvised balance between the hard-liners and moderates in his administration. With the instincts of a brilliant bureaucratic infighter, Mr. Yeltsin has shifted back and forth between these two camps. He allowed his special envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to take a soft position in the Belgrade negotiations. Then when the peace accord was reached, he suddenly switched to a harder position. The result can seem like chaos to outsiders, but it suits today's Russian situation, where the Kremlin oscillates between a yearning for patriotic toughness and a desire for good relations with the West. It is still unclear whether the Russian troop deployment in Kosovo was ordered by the Kremlin or a lower-level military officer. Moscow yesterday insisted that Mr. Yeltsin had given a broad mandate to his peacekeeping forces, authorizing them to enter Kosovo whenever they wanted. Other Russian media reports said the deployment order was issued by General Anatoly Kvashnin, the Russian military's chief of staff. Whether Mr. Yeltsin had ordered the deployment or not, he quickly jumped on the bandwagon to support it, promoting the general who led the peacekeepers into Kosovo. Despite the outraged reaction from some NATO countries, U.S. diplomats in Moscow were sanguine about the Russian troop deployment. They said the Russian troop presence in Kosovo is still too small to have anything more than a symbolic effect on the NATO peacekeeping force. With fewer than 200 troops so far, the Russians cannot possibly counterbalance the planned 50,000 troops in the NATO force. If this is true, it could mean another victory for Russian tactics. It suggests that the Russians will be able to frustrate NATO and grab the Pristina airport without even causing any serious damage to their financial relations with the West. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nyteeu-06.19.99-04:09:25-18541