GUAM Back to Life?
en.fondsk.ruEurasia
25.08.2010
Bogdan TSIRDYA (Moldova)
No doubt, 2010 has been a watershed year in Eurasian geopolitics.
Favorable economic conditions helped Russia achieve serious political
gains, though, in fact, the basis for some of the ongoing geopolitical
transformations emerged in 2008 when Georgia lost the Five Day War.
Georgia’s defeat and the advent of pro-Russian Yanukovich in Kyiv
meant the end of the NATO expansion east and the reestablishment of
Russian gas transit across Ukraine. As for the anti-Russian GUAM bloc,
it suffered a lethal blow. Moscow’s positions in the Black Sea region
became stronger when Russia and Ukraine signed the contract extending
the lease of the Sevastopol naval base till 2042. It is widely held in
the expert community that – not only in the nuclear arms sphere – the
signing of The New START Treaty with the US restored Russia’s
superpower status. Russia and the US jointly took a firm moral
leadership role worldwide and at the moment define the global
development trends.
A regrouping of forces in the settlement in Transdnistria also took
place after May, 2010. The joint declaration on the issue signed by
the presidents of Russia and Ukraine on May 18 showed clearly that in
the future the two countries would be implementing a concerted
approach towards Moldova. The document reaffirmed the stabilizing
impact of the peacekeeping operation which is underway in the region.
As a result, the hope of the Moldovan right and the West to expel
Russia from the region and to invite European mediators supporting
Moldova’s current administration to take Moscow’s place evaporated.
The signing of the June, 2010 Russian-German memorandum on the
establishment of the Russia-EU committee on foreign policy and
security at ministerial level led watchers to conclude that Moscow and
Berlin were about to reach consensus on the settlement in
Transdnistria. A breakthrough was also made in the sphere of CIS
integration projects. The code of the Customs Union of Russia,
Belarus, and Kazakhstan was enacted on July 6, 2010 as stated at the
EurAsEC summit in Astana. The presidents of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
indicated that the two countries would likely join the Customs Union
which considers erasing national borders by 2012 or even forming a
common currency space in a more distant future.
The above geopolitical shifts echoed with deep concern in the West
which saw its plans to fragment the CIS and to gain control over
Eurasian energy supply routes jeopardized. Meeting with Washington’s
resistance, the South Stream project was still outpacing the
US-patronized Nabucco. Under the circumstances, Washington had to
focus on the scenarios of `gentle’ containment of Russia. In the
context, a key role was given to Moldova, the republic where the April
6-7, 2009 color revolution swept away the administration Moscow could
regard as more or less cooperative. The Alliance for European
Integration put together in great rush started ` gradually but
steadily – to steer Moldova away from Russia towards NATO and Romania
and to strengthen the dormant GUAM. Romania’s president and the
region’s number one US loyalist Traian BÄ?sescu became the de facto
curator of the Alliance.
Shortly after D. Medvedev and V. Yanukovych signed the joint
declaration, Moldova’s interim president Mihai Ghimpu signed the
divisive decree setting June 28, 1940 as the date of Soviet occupation
and calling for an immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from
Transdnistria. Ghimpu’s decree saw the light of day immediately after
Romanian president rather unexpectedly unveiled his discovery that
Russian peacekeepers in Transdnistria somehow posed a threat to
Romania’s security. Interestingly, almost at the same time the
Lithuanian parliament added to the country’s criminal code an article
making the denial of `Soviet occupation’ a punishable offense. In a
clear effort to champion the cause, the Georgian administration
highlighted not one but two dates in the national calendar,
establishing February 25 as the `occupation day’ and August 23 ` as
`the victims of totalitarian regimes memorial date’. All of the above
is unlikely to be a coincidence.
Media reported on August 6-17 that presidents M. Ghimpu and M.
Saakashvili met in Georgia to declare their commitment to reanimating
GUAM believed to be stillborn since 2007. At the moment Belarus ` the
republic going through a period of chill in the relations with Russia
– is being lured into GUAM to fill in the vacuum left by Ukraine which
no longer takes any interest in the bloc. Russia seemed explainably
unperturbed by the plan to revive GUAM ` from the strategic point of
view, the bloc was too big a failure to ever be taken seriously. The
attempts made by certain forces in the West to support the color
revolution which started brewing in Andijon in 2005 alienated
Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s key player in the gas market which was
supposed to be GUAM’s heavyweight. Moreover, for practically all of
the GUAM countries the membership came with serious costs. Moldova had
to shoulder the gas price of $230 per 1,000 cu m instead of the
previous $80 and barely retained a quarter of its former share of
Russia’s vine market. The losses eventually forced the Moldovan
president to state that the involvement of the country with GUAM would
from now on be limited to economic projects. Georgia had to say
Goodbye to 1/5 of its Soviet-era territory and, by the way, was
debarred from Russia’s vine market completely. For Ukraine, membership
in GUAM earned problems with Moscow and, of course, the European-level
gas prices. Even the Odessa-Brody oil transit project – invented as an
alternative to Russia’s Druzhba pipeline ` collapsed as the pipeline
construction was frozen before reaching Europe.
Without Ukraine and the oil-rich Azerbaijan, these days GUAM stands no
chance as an alternative to Russia in the sphere of energy supplies.
Azerbaijan’s energy sector is cooperating tightly with Russia, and
Ukraine under Yanukovych shares a series of significant projects with
Russia in the aerospace and metallurgy sectors that sooner or later
are sure to boost Ukraine’s GDP, so that its participation in
anti-Russian projects seems out of question.
Belarus can only be admitted to GUAM with an observer status.
Considering that the country is a member of the Customs Union and the
Collective Security Treaty Organization, it is improbable that
President Lukashenko will dare to outrage Moscow over GUAM.
Nevertheless, the Ghimpu-Saakashvili mini-summit was not an escapade
staged by two madmen. Ghimpu is in the full sense of the word a
subordinate of BÄ?sescu who is a staunch ally of the US. Obviously, the
West is launching a broad offensive against the CIS aimed at
preventing the Customs Union from expanding and achieving greater
cohesion. Tensions between the pool of Georgia, Moldova, and Belarus,
on the one side, and Russia, on the other, must be an element of the
plan. Washington has already done part of the work. BÄ?sescu announced
on February 4, 2010 that Romania would host US missile defense
infrastructures, and Belarus reneged on the pledge to recognize the
independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Contrary to expectations,
the US did not have to close the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan. Serbia
is carved up and Georgia is in the process of active rearmament.
Moldova took part in NATO exercises and signed an agreement on
security forces cooperation with Romania.
Notably, the list of countries invited to the would-be `GUBAM` is `
with the exception of Armenia – identical to that of the Eastern
Partnership. Consequently, both blocs might be components of the same
project. These days GUAM no longer dispenses markedly unrealistic
promises to create pipeline networks alternative to those owned by
Russia or to rid the West of the dependency on Russian energy supplies
(though the Nabucco project and the plan to extend the Odessa-Brody
pipeline to Poland’s PÅ?ock are still alive). The current agenda seems
to be:
– To prevent the enlargement of the Customs Union and the Collective
Security Treaty Organization and to divert Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Moldova, and others from joining the blocs by building `alternative’
alliances. In the case of Mensk the plan is to convince Belarus to
sacrifice its membership in the above organizations.
– To form a cordon around Russia which would be locked once the
administration in Ukraine is replaced.
– To coordinate anti-Russian activities, to smear Moscow in the UN,
the Council of Europe, the PACE, and the OSCE; to jointly stake
financial claims against Russia over `occupation’, `repressions’,
`holodomor’, the 1992 and 2008 `aggressions’, etc., thus making it
possible for the US and the EU to arbitrate and mediate as in fact
they routinely do.
– To downscale the Russian space by limiting the use of the Russian
language, jointly commemorating `occupations’ and `repression
victims’, etc.
– To provoke gas wars against Russia (Belarus being the candidate for
an active role in the process).
– To coordinate efforts aimed at getting Russian peacekeepers out of
Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova and bringing in NATO forces instead.
– To create common political, economic, and military infrastructures
for the integration of the countries located in the Western part of
the CIS into NATO.
______________________
Bogdan Tsidrya is the Political Programs Director of the Priznanie
Russian Humanitarian Foundation
From: A. Papazian