MIPC/MMNK: UPI: Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov Visit to Washington DC

By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, Sep 24, 2001 -- The mutual fear of radical Islamic terror is propelling the United States and Russia toward a possible far reaching global cooperation undreamed of only two weeks ago.

Cautious Russian President Vladimir Putin is stopping far short of military cooperation with the United States when it moves against accused terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, America's main suspect for the terrible Sept. 11 hijacked airliner terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and took nearly 7,000 lives.

But Putin has already approved highly significant support and cooperation with the United States over dealing with Afghanistan, and senior Russian officials and diplomats have made clear that if the United States heeds their concerns in key policy areas, they are ready and able to step up their cooperation too.

Last Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, speaking at Washington's Monarch Hotel, called for a broadly based global effort to strengthen international law and international institutions to combat terror.

And Ivanov told the dinner, co-sponsored by the Washington-based Nixon Center and the Moscow International Petroleum Club, that Russia and the United States use the catastrophe of Sept. 11 to build a "qualitatively new" relationship between them.

None of this was imaginable before Black Tuesday, Sept. 11. For its first eight months in office, the Bush administration appeared to go out of its way to ignore Russian concerns on key issues. It proceeded on the apparent assumption that Russia no longer mattered as a major power and it therefore did not matter what the Russians thought on anything.

The administration announced it was prepared to unilaterally leave the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, rather than seek to build its new ABM system in cooperation with the Russians within an amended framework of that treaty.

And in a June 15 speech in Warsaw, President Bush made clear he was determined to expand the NATO military alliance to include further nations in Central and Eastern Europe, including at least one and possibly all of the three Baltic states that were part of the Soviet Union -- though not by their own choice -- until 1990.

But after the awful catastrophe of Black Tuesday, U.S. strategic and global priorities underwent a seismic upheaval. All of a sudden, cooperation with Russia to bring military and other pressure to bear on Afghanistan -- one of the fiercest, most primitive and inaccessible nations in the world -- becoming an overriding U.S. national priority.

Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov met President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell during his visit to Washington last week. Both Russian and U.S. sources say the talks were constructive and went extremely well.

In a televised address to the Russian nation Monday, Putin announced new initiatives that certainly appeared to confirm these assessments. Russia would boost its support for the Northern Alliance that opposes the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that is believed to be protecting bin Laden, he said. This aid would involve sending its armed forces "additional help in the form of arms and military equipment," Putin said.

Putin also pledged to share crucial intelligence from Russia's still formidable SVR foreign intelligence service with the U.S. And he opened Russia's air space to flights carrying humanitarian aid.

Putin stopped far short of offering any Russian air or military bases as staging posts for U.S. forces attacking remote, inaccessible Afghanistan. Nor did he allow U.S. aircraft to overfly Russian airspace on military missions in support of such operations.

Ivanov said at the Monarch Hotel last Wednesday that the issue of deploying NATO forces "had not been raised" at that point in U.S.-Russian bilateral consultations concerning responses to the attacks.

But Putin left the door open for those, and other forms, of cooperation in the future.

"The depth and quality of this cooperation will be directly dependent on the general level and quality of our relations with these countries and on mutual understanding in the battle with international terrorism," the Russian president said.

Russian officials have made very clear to the U.S. government and to other American interlocutors some of the conditions they would demand to boost such cooperation.

"The Russian agenda is fighting Muslim fundamentalists in Chechnya," said Dimitri Simes, president of the Washington-based Nixon Center, and a leading expert on U.S.-Russian relations. "They want to be sure that in any agreement (between the United States and Russia) the Chechen issue is also included."

The new and growing amity between the United States and Russia in fighting the specter of Islamic extremism that now threatens both is not, however, without its problems and uncertainties.

When Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton visited Moscow after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, Russian officials said they were "taken aback" by what they said were Bolton's demands that Russia accept the U.S. position on missile defense and other issues.

Russian officials described Bolton's remarks as "out of tone" with the language of cooperation and partnership they said they had heard from president Bush and secretary of State Colin Powell.

Simes said that uncertainty still persisted in Moscow over the future direction of U.S. policy toward Russia,

"The Russians are asking themselves: 'Are there good cops and bad cops in the Bush administration?'" he said. "Did Bolton just speak out of turn? Or does the administration really expect to continue 'business as usual' with Moscow along the lines (laid out) before Sept.11?

"The Russians are still concerned that even if they cooperate fully with the United States (on Afghanistan and terror), their own priorities are going to be ignored by Washington," Simes said.

The message that both Putin and Ivanov brought was clear. Russia's current leadership still hopes to build a close partnership with the United States. But it will not be on terms that the United States alone dictates.