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  • GUAM Back to Life?

    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
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