International Affairs No. 3, 2015 – Table of Contents

Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs: This year we are observing two notable dates: the 70th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War and the 70th anniversary of the UN. Regarding the first date, everything is clear: The many events timed to coincide with May 9 are being widely promoted. How important is the other date, and how will it be observed? …

IN RECENT YEARS, the global situation has experienced powerful shocks that have aggravated existing contradictions, fanned tensions and given rise to various threats. On the one hand, processes of mutual integration of countries remain in place and are, moreover, being speeded up by globalization, and there is a search for an optimum model of international relations based on principles of polycentrism. On the other, effects of the global financial and economic crisis are not subsiding, and in various regions – in Europe (Ukraine), in the Middle East, in Northeast Asia – there exist serious challenges to regional and global security. Time and again, unresolved old-time territorial disputes or consequences of the hegemonic policy of the United States or its allies spark conflicts.

It was the United States that orchestrated and provoked the conflict in Ukraine, the aim being to isolate and weaken Russia. The Asia-Pacific Region is the only relatively stable part of the world, a region that, moreover, has been comparatively successful in fighting the aftermath of the crisis, although there too are some dangerous smoldering hotbeds of tension – the North Korean nuclear program and territorial disputes between some of the countries. …

TWELVE MONTHS AGO, the Ukrainian crisis invaded the space of international relations; today, a year later, we know much more about its origins and sponsors and have acquired a much clearer idea about its meaning. Ukraine was destined to become a geopolitical battlefield that to a great extent is shaping the global future.

The Ukrainian developments will diagnose the current geopolitical trends either as hegemonic or multipolar. This is not the best time for Washington: obstacles are high while opposition is stiff which casts doubts on its status of a superpower hegemon. There are enough problems at home which narrow down the leeway for the American policy-makers. …

CONTRARY TO FORECASTS, the Tories carried the elections. Should we blame the analysts who in unison forecasted another hung parliament?

The results of the general elections in Britain caused a huge sensation: the Tories got 311 seats, Labour, 232, the Scottish National Party (SNP), 56; Lib-Dems, 8; the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Greens, one seat each. …

THE ISSUE of admitting new members has recently become one of the key priorities on the agenda of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Back in the 1990s, the SCO was a little-known forum uniting Russia. China, and a number of Central Asian states, which was dealing with the settlement of border issues on the basis of agreements on confidence-building in the military area and the mutual reductions of armed forces in the border area. The SCO Charter has only taken effect in 2003, and all major standing bodies of the Organization were only formed early in 2004. …

Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs

THE TITLE needs a question mark. Indeed, did the Big Three halt a step away from global cooperation? How many mines were laid under the alliance and partnership and when? Natalia Narochnitskaia once said that “Yalta and counter-Yalta were born together.” …

IN THE PRESENT-DAY international situation, security has become a paramount concern. The end of the Cold War era brought about deep changes in global politics, which led to a new quality in the system of international relations. The threat of a global nuclear catastrophe gave way to new challenges, such as international terrorism, religious extremism, organized crime, drug trafficking, and cybercrime.

The world in general and international relations have changed considerably. It has become obvious that conventional methods that are at the disposal of states cannot be applied to fighting against new threats. Global security depends on a large number of factors aimed at preventing the spread of various extremist political trends using violence and terror as the main tool of achieving their goals. …

International Affairs: Heres our first question, Yuri Konstantinovich: The sanctions regime has presently become one of the most sensitive aspects in the relations between Russia and the West. Do you think that this kind of policy pursued by European nations and the United States has been dealing damage to Russia’s economic development?

And against this background we presently have sanctions introduced against Russia. Considering only the damage done by them is just oversimplifying the problem. Sanctions have hit hard our relations in both political and economic terms, hampering the integration process. As a Russian national I’m convinced that 90 percent of Russian people think that Europe should sort out if it really wants to cut short Russia’s …

THE ISSUE OF PALESTINE is unique, and not only because it is part and parcel of the Middle East conflict and attempts to solve it. The study of the experience of the political institutionalization of the Arab Palestinian territories, of the structuring of Palestinian political processes, of the activities and split of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and of the record of the international community as the “architect” of modern Palestine makes it possible to evaluate the roles of Palestinian domestic actors and political elites, understand internal and external factors in building new states in the Middle East, and assess the effectiveness of proposed systems of political organization.

It will be essential to mention here that unrecognized states are an old problem in international political practice. Some of the modern states have been through periods of non-recognition that spanned years. The contradiction in international law between the right of nations to self-determination and the principle of territorial integrity is a potential source of unrecognized states.¹ …

FEW PEOPLE would presently question self-importance of a cultural factor in world politics. One could easily agree with the British political scientist A. Hopkins who held that culture has always been impacting global processes, despite the fact that researchers have long been giving preference to politics and the economy over culture when evaluating global phenomena.

Historically, globalization trends were more rapidly growing during the inter-civilization wars, ages of great geographical discoveries, religious expansionism, European cultural influence on the external world throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, industrial and scientific discoveries, as well as the colonial division of the world. …

International Affairs: Mr. Ambassador, the Ukraine crisis shows convincingly that in the absence of wars between the leading states in the world, a special role is beginning to be played by information warfare, i.e., the struggle for the hearts and minds. This, however, does not change the essence. This still is about the striving to promote one’s national interests and inflict a defeat on the “adversary.” This is nothing new: The Crimean War and World War I were marked by active informational support, if this word can be used to describe direct official propaganda. If in the first case it was necessary to convince domestic public opinion about the necessity of military spending, in the second it was about the need to continue the war no matter how hopeless it seemed in late 1914. What could you tell our readers about the information warfare in the UK on the issue of Ukraine?

Alexander Yakovenko, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to the United Kingdom; secretariat.org.uk …

The Beginning

TWO CONSECUTIVE ENLARGEMENTS of NATO – membership for the Central European Three (Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic) in 1991 and the “big bang” of enlargement of March 2004 – made Ukraine, a seat of instability, a borderland between two Europes: the West and Russia. The unresolved dilemma of common spaces of Greater Europe made the planned and realized expansions of Western alliances the crucial point of the relationships between Russia and the West. The West which did not hesitate to push into the post-Soviet space, a zone of Russia’s special interests, in two directions (NATO and the EU) merely fanned the smoldering conflict; the color revolutions in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 revealed its depth and systemic nature. …

TODAY’S POLAND, or, more accurately, its leadership, in a strange way supports the openly extremist nationalistic regime that took power in Kiev in February 2014 and glorifies the exploits of Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War. But Stepan Bandera and other leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) had their arms up to the elbows in Polish blood. Forgetting this means encouraging modern followers of Bandera to commit similar atrocities. And they have been trying hard as well, for example burning people alive in Odessa, something their predecessors had done in Poland, and not too long ago either.

From the moment of its emergence in 1929, the OUN saw Poland as a historical enemy of a “united (soborna) Ukraine,” along with the “Moscow Empire.” All OUN leaders were former military officers of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR), which existed in Galicia and was occupied by Poland in 1919 with the consent of the Entente countries. This was the source of bitter anti-Polish sentiment on the part of the OUN’s leadership and rank-and-file members. Between 1929 and 1939, the OUN carried out a series of notorious terrorist attacks against top Polish officials, including Polish leader Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. These terrorist activities peaked in the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934. It is worth mentioning that the OUN enjoyed serious support in Polish-occupied Western Ukraine because of the Polish government’s chauvinistic anti-Ukrainian policy. …

IN THE LAST QUARTER of a century, it has become clear that neither great powers nor small and average states nor even the United States are happy with international chaos. No wonder, there is a (still latent) desire to move to a new international horizon of confidence and predictable behavior of all subjects of international relations. This is hardly surprising since in the last few years the world has been facing the unpredictable United States, the mightiest of international subjects, which has imposed on mankind a choice between a new world order and a worldwide military catastrophe. Is there a force strong enough to offer an alternative to the slipping into an abyss of hopelessness and initiate adequate measures? Which country except Putin’s Russia can shoulder the burden? Has the world found itself at the threshold of another Cold War which offers no choice but a third world war?

The Cold, Hot and World War …

International Affairs: Mr. Nalbandian, what are the priorities of the ministry that you head?

Our people, who lived through the first genocide of the past century, feel a special moral responsibility for the mobilization of the international community’s efforts to prevent new crimes against humanity. …

THE LEADERSHIP of the Republic of Tajikistan was obliged to make hard decisions during the country’s transition to state sovereignty. These decisions brought our country into the world community as a subject of international law and international relations – an historic national goal.

This also was the initial stage in Tajikistan’s international activity (lasting until March 2000) which took our country from separate diplomatic actions of momentary importance to a systematic implementation of its full-scale concept of interaction with the rest of the world. The nature, dynamics, eventfulness, and duration of this stage were contingent on civil war in the country and on overcoming its consequences as part of the peace process aimed at reaching national accord. …

International Affairs: Now that Greece has a new government with the SYRIZA and ANEL parties forming the ruling coalition, how do you see current and future Russian-Greek relations?

The preparation of the program for the Russia Year in Greece and the Greece Year in Russia in 2016 will be an important factor in our interaction. We are determined to cooperate with Greece intensively and see it as a serious and friendly partner that is open to dialogue. Russian-Greek relations rest on a solid, time-tested foundation – mutual emotional affinity and warmth, the shared cultural legacy of the two Orthodox Christian nations, many centuries of cooperation between them, including during wartime, and close intertwining of individual lives. …

THE PAST FEW YEARS have seen what, to all intents and purposes, is the revival of sea piracy. Hundreds of incidents in the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Guinea, and elsewhere on the high seas, involving attacks on ships from dozens of countries, have again made piracy one of the main threats to international security. That this is a fact is obvious from intensive anti-piracy measures by individual states and by the entire world community. Since 2008, the United Nations Security Council has passed over a dozen resolutions on just one aspect of this problem, piracy off Somalia, which has reached unprecedented proportions.

These resolutions may be considered a landmark as they mean that the Security Council, which, under the UN Charter, is the chief guardian of international peace and security, has taken up a specific case of criminal law, a threat from non-governmental entities. Namely, the formidable mechanism of international security law, which came into being as a response to aggressive conduct by legally recognized governments, has been applied to criminal challenges of non-governmental provenance. …

THE ARCTIC ASPECTS of intergovernmental relations between Russia and Canada, and their contacts with respect to northern affairs in general, may with good reasons be considered the most promising form of interaction between the two countries, largely due to the international significance of the Arctic, its impressive natural resources, primarily its hydrocarbon deposits, its military strategic role, and its infrastructural and logistic factors.

For many years, Canada positioned itself in its Arctic policies as an inseparable part of the Western world, sharing its anti-Soviet line. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the bloc confrontation, and the plummeting role of geopolitics in international relations, the distribution of rights to the control and use of Arctic territories and resources remains an uncompleted process. …

ON MARCH 30, 1867, the Russian Empire signed the Treaty concerning the Cession of the Russian Possessions in North America by His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias to the United States of America. Today, there is no agreement in Russia about the reasons behind the decision of the czarist government to sell this part of the Russian territory to the United States. This is an old story which should have been relegated to the past, or at least, should not have caused heated discussions nowadays. What adds heat to these discussions at this stage of Russia’s post-Soviet history?

In the past, Muscovite princes, Russian autocrats, and the Soviet leaders lost and then regained bits and pieces of their state in wars or political cataclysms. In 1721, Peter the Great approved the signing of the Treaty of Nystad with Sweden and joined Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, part of Karelia, and several islands in the Baltic to his possessions in exchange for two million silver Thalers, an enormous sum at that time. The deal was legalized by an international treaty. …

DURING the last few decades, opinions about Vyacheslav Molotov, his role and his personality and about practically all other prominent Soviet political figures, for that matter, have swung back and forth from extolment to unacceptable rudeness.

In the 1930s, the Soviet efforts to set up a system of collective security in Europe were torpedoed by the Western powers which preferred an appeasement of the aggressor, who was becoming more and more impudent, in a vain hope to push him to the east, to an anti-Nazi agreement with the Soviet Union. In March 1939, the U.S.S.R. invited British and French delegations to Moscow to discuss an agreement on “mutual obligations to immediately extend assistance, including military assistance, in case of an aggression in Europe against any of the contracting states.”¹ Unwilling or unable to shoulder “mutual obligations” of this sort the French and the British wriggled out of the agreement which was never signed. …

THE FIRST EDITION of A Great Future: Germans in Russia’s Economy is a hardcover volume of nearly 400 pages which appeared as a companion to the exhibition of the same name in 2000 held under the auspices of Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Now we have its updated version put out in German and Russian for the 2012 exhibition. It describes nearly 800 years of commercial and economic contacts between Russia and Germany. The introduction describes those centuries as “an uninterrupted line of development with its ups and downs” (p. 8).

The inception of trade relations between Russia and Germany came in the Middle Ages, roughly, in the middle of the eighth century. They were interrupted only during the world wars. The first German trade missions were established in Novgorod and expanded after Archangelsk, Moscow, and Petersburg joined in. The presence of German merchants gradually extended to include the Volga Region, the Urals, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. …

RUSSIA has fallen on hard times. The entire pro-U.S. army has turned against this country, which seeks to assert in international relations the principles of law, equality, justice, equal security for all states and nations in the world, good neighborliness, and mutually beneficial cooperation. However, this approach toward international affairs is not to the liking of those forces in the U.S. and some other states that are trying to preserve the system of dictate, subordination and sanctions, which is humiliating for the world community.

These attempts are doomed to failure. Russia has been and will remain a great intellectual and spiritual Eurasian power. …

PEOPLE ACROSS THE WORLD have long been applauding Russian musical arts. Main opera stages in Milan, Vienna, London, and New York have hosted Russian operas performed by Russian singers. Take, for instance, an unforgettable 2013-2014 season in the Metropolitan Opera which opened with “Eugene Onegin” starring Anna Netrebko and Oksana Volkova and conducted by maestro Valery Gergiev. Borodin’s “Prince Igor” featuring the amazing bass Ildar Abdrazakov has caused a lot of admiration and also become a subject of numerous debates. The audience greeted the musicians with great ovation exceeding all imaginable expectations.

This season in the Met may not be as saturated with Russian music as in some previous years, but Russian singers take part in the “Don Carlos” and “Lucia di Lammermoor” performances. …