G8 absence threatens US-Russian rapport

Financial Times

When the G8 leaders gather at Camp David on Friday, one will be missing. Vladimir Putin, who was scheduled to have a post-summit meeting with Barack Obama, US president, sent his Dmitry Medvedev, prime minister, at the last minute instead.

The reason for his absence is still hotly debated in Moscow – almost no one believes the officially proffered reason that Mr Putin wants to stay in Moscow to interview prospective cabinet officials.

The cancellation casts a sudden pall over US-Russian relations, especially in the wake of Mr Putin’s aggressively anti-western campaign for the presidency, which he won on March 4. He barely let a public appearance go by without accusing the US of secretly plotting to overthrow him.

His absence seems to realise the worst predictions that the re-election of Mr Putin would mean the end of the tentative thaw in relations known as the “reset”, described in March by outgoing president Mr Medvedev as “the best three years in Russia-US relations in a decade”. Those may indeed now be over.

“The beginning of the Obama-Putin relationship doesn’t look optimistic,” said Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute for US and Canadian Studies in Moscow, who declined to guess at the reasons for Putin’s absence, underlining the extent to which even senior experts are puzzled by the Kremlin’s Byzantine ways.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, the think-tank, said: “The [US-Russia] relationship is certainly wrong-footed at this point.

“I’m not fundamentally pessimistic: I think he [Putin] can still change step, but the beginning is not very auspicious.”

Mr Putin’s absence is variously interpreted as a calculated snub aimed at the west – his first foreign visit will either be to Belarus or Kazakhstan – or a fit of temper.

“No one knows how Putin’s decision-making works. No one knows who he talks to,” said one former US official.

Domestic factors may indeed be weighing heavily – the announcement of the cabinet, expected on May 8, is still delayed, possibly by infighting among rival officials. “I am amazed at the tardiness of the cabinet announcement,” said Mr Trenin. “It certainly doesn’t look like business as usual.”

Lastly, however, it is likely that neither the White House nor the Kremlin saw a highly visible Obama-Putin summit as a particularly good idea at this juncture, given election year politics in the US.
“I suspect that some members of President Obama’s team are actually relieved not to have to host Putin at the White House right now,” said Andrew Weiss, director of the Rand Center for Russia and Eurasia in the US. “Clearly, Obama needs to kindle a serious rapport with Putin but the tendency to put US-Russian relations under a microscope is going to make that a lot more difficult.”

The White House is still smarting from an open-mic gaffe at a March nuclear summit in which Mr Obama and Mr Medvedev appeared to be cutting a secret deal to give the US president “space” on missile defence during this election year. Mr Obama might have been only too happy to miss an opportunity to shake hands with Mr Putin in the full glare of Fox News and his Republican rivals. “There would have been a lot of potential ‘gotcha’ moments, on both sides,” said Mr Weiss.

“All of the focus on who dissed whom is probably misplaced,” he said. “There simply aren’t a lot of urgent issues on the US-Russian agenda at the moment let alone ones that simply have to be addressed at the highest levels.”

While US-Russia relations certainly look set for a rough patch, the future of the “reset” will likely be hostage to the US election results. “The US Republicans have started a crusade against the reset,” said Mr Rogov, who says he is worried by “the return of ideology to US-Russia relations”.

However, if Mr Obama is re-elected, he will (as the world found out in March) have more flexibility to negotiate on the flashpoints such as missile defence. Mr Putin’s attitude, meanwhile, seems to be one of wait and see. “Putin certainly approved of the reset, otherwise it would never have happened,” said Mr Trenin.

After initial disagreements over how to deal with revolution in Russia’s ally Syria, both countries now back the peace process overseen by Kofi Annan. “On the other pressing issues – Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan – the positions of the US and Russia are actually in fairly decent alignment at the moment,” said Mr Weiss.

With Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, and if the US repeals the cold war-era Jackson-Vanik amendment to allow US companies to participate in the freer trade regime with Russia, more economic links could be built.

Russia, however, has promised to respond “asymmetrically” if the US passes the Magnitsky Act, which would ban Russian officials involved in human rights abuses from travelling to the US and freeze their US assets.

“Twenty years after the cold war, Russian-American relations are still fundamentally security focused, and the stabilising factor is still mutually assured destruction,” said Mr Rogov. “The economic relationship is not large enough to play a stabilising role. That is what we need to do something about.” hairy girl unshaven girls https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php www.zp-pdl.com онлайн займы