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// They won't let Putin turn Bucharest into another Munich
Apr. 02, 2008 - Kommersant by Mikhail Zygar, Vladimir Solovyev - Mikhail Kasyanov will speak at Bucharest, Vladimir Putin won't The NATO summit opens today in Bucharest and it may be the most scandalous summit in the organization's history. Ukraine and Georgia will make last ditch efforts to receive membership action plans from the alliance, and Russia and its key economic partners will try to stop them. The format of the Russia-NATO meetings will not give Putin a chance to make another Munich speech. The presidents of Georgia and Ukraine and former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov will have their say though. Anti-Munich Even before the summit began, Russian President Vladimir Putin's participation in it was a source of controversy. The Russian leader is to arrive in Bucharest on Thursday to participate in a meeting of the Russia-NATO council on Friday, the summit's final day. The day before the summit began, however, the Russian side accused the alliance of intending to deprive Putin of the chance to be heard. Notably, Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin, when asked in an interview published in Moskovsky komsomolets newspaper on March 31 if the Russian president would make another Munich speech in Bucharest, stated that would be impossible because of the different format of the NATO summit. “The Munich speech was public and addressed not so much to persons making the decisions as to the people. In Bucharest everything will be different. The entire discussion of the Russia-NATO council will be in the format that it is usually held in – closed.” But in the evening of the same day, Rogozin expressed a different point of view.
World Practice
Rogozin noted that the Ukraine-NATO and Russia-NATO councils were set up differently. In the first instance, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko will deliver opening addresses. In the latter instance, only de Hoop Scheffer will. After the first council, de Hoop Scheffer and Yushchenko will hold a joint press conference, while, after the second, de Hoop Scheffer alone will hold a press conference. Rogozin concluded that “the leadership of the alliance has chosen a course toward curtailing the discussion. The Russian president will be unable speak publicly about important questions of world politics. It looks incorrect and all attempts to cite the rules are out of place.” At NATO headquarters, Kommersant was assured that the format of the Russia-NATO council was indeed traditional. In 2002, that functions of that organ were reformatted at Russia's initiative. Previously, the NATO secretary general and the Russian representative sat together on the podium and representatives of the NATO member countries sat at a common table. In 2002, Russia became an equal partner of NATO and its representative (who will be Putin in Bucharest) now sits at the round table with the presidents of the member countries, who are seated in alphabetic order by name of country – Putin will sit between Romanian President Trajan Basescu and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown. Since 2002, the NATO secretary general has been the sole chairman of the council. He opens the meeting, after which the press leaves the auditorium and the council members discuss their business. “Since Russia is an equal member of the Russia-NATO council, it would be unethical in relation to the other leaders to give Vladimir Putin the floor along with the secretary general,” a spokesman at NATO said. “Then President Bush, President Sarkozy or Chancellor Merkel might have the desire to speak. Then there would be no constructive discussion at all, everyone will speak exclusively to the public.” An official NATO representative said that all meetings since 2002 have taken place away from journalists and so far the Russian side (as Rogozin admitted in his interview with Moskovsky komsomolets) had not objected. In addition, the NATO press service told Kommersant, they had been informed that Putin intended to hold his own press conference immediately after de Hoop Scheffer's. “And why would NATO invite Vladimir Putin to the summit, if it didn't wish to listen to him?” the spokesman asked. The format of Ukraine-NATO meetings is different by tradition. Ukraine is not an equal partner, and Yushchenko can appear side-by-side with the NATO secretary general twice before journalists. The disagreement did not stop there. Traditionally, the participants in the council have passed a joint declaration at the end of it. But it is not clear what they can agree on. Russia and the NATO countries have differing views on all the principle questions (SALT, missile defense, Kosovo). Another problem is the initiative to create Russia-NATO council public forum, which would carry out informational work on the cooperation between Moscow and Brussels, that is, partially, strive to improve NATO's image in Russia. For that purpose, Russia and the alliance are supposed to spend joint funds on conferences, seminars and surveys on issues of Euro-Atlantic security. Moscow is not terribly interested in the project, however, fearing that NATO will use it to create “undependable” noncommercial organizations. The only real joint accomplishment Russia and NATO have is an agreement to simplify the procedure for overland transport of NATO cargo to Afghanistan. According to information obtained by Kommersant, Russia is considering not issuing any declaration after the council session if the discussion takes a bad turn. Moscow's charges over the format of Putin's Bucharest speech can be considered a warm up for just such a turn.
Anti-Summit
A conference being held March 1-3 by the Romanian Foreign Ministry, the German Marshall Fund and Chatham House may turn into a second scandal at the NATO summit. The NATO forum is structured in such a way that the majority of the leaders attending it will not have a chance to make an effective speech, just as Putin is unable to. But some of them will speak from the podium of the Bucharest conference. The presidents of the United States, Latvia, Afghanistan and Estonia, prime ministers of Canada and Romania and foreign ministers of Poland and Turkey are speaking there today. Tomorrow will be the most unpleasant day for the Russian delegation, however. It will begin with a discussion entitled “Does Ukraine Need NATO,” with two former Ukrainian foreign ministers and members of the Rada from the Party of the Regions and Our Ukraine Konstantin Grishchenko and Boris Tarasyuk taking part. Then the topic of missile defense in Europe will be raised, with chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs Konstantin Kosachev, Polish Defense Minister Bogdan Klich and Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Vondra invited to the discussion. The last and most intriguing debate will be dedicated to Russia itself. Former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, State Duma member Sergey Markov and member of the British parliament from the Conservative Party Baroness Neville-Jones will take part. Thus, Kasyanov will have the opportunity to speak before a broad audience in Bucharest, and Putin will not. Another distinguishing feature of the Bucharest conference is that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili took part in its opening. He was also given the chance to express himself in the so-called night session, which had not begun at the moment this story was filed. The press service of the Georgian president told Kommersant that Saakashvili will take that opportunity to urge the opponents of giving his country a membership action plan to change their minds.
Anti-NATO
The 26 members of NATO have two questions to settle at the summit. They will accept three new members into their ranks that have gone through all the preparatory steps for alliance membership. They are Albania, Macedonia and Croatia. Then they will respond to the petitions of Georgia and Ukraine, whose authorities simultaneously asked to be given membership action plans. There is no controversy over accepting the new members. Only Greek authorities are disturbing the idyll there. Since the collapse of Yugoslavia, Greek authorities have been strongly opposed to Macedonia calling itself Macedonia, since a region with the same name existed as part of the ancient Greek world. A compromise is likely to be found today, since Macedonia in NATO documents is already known as “The Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia.” The situation with the membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia is ambiguous, although the countries tried from the beginning to unite their efforts to obtain their passes to NATO membership. Ukraine filed its application for a membership action plan with de Hoop Scheffer in January of this year. A month later, Georgia did the same. “I will not hide the fact that we are carefully coordinating our actions with Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko,” Saakashvili told Kommersant. “Much unites our countries, and that is not just because President Yushchenko is my son's godfather. Our interests simply coincide.” The interests of Georgia and Ukraine clearly coincide with those of the U.S. as well. Washington willingly took on patronage of those countries. Last month, when Georgia's application for a membership action plan had just reached Brussels, the American Senate vote unanimously in favor of a resolution in support of NATO membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia. Among the authors of the resolution was presidential favorite Barack Obama. They call on U.S. authorities to do everything possible that Ukraine and Georgia should become members of the alliance as soon as possible. U.S. President George W. Bush received Saakashvili at the White House in March and promised to support his efforts to draw closer to the alliance. He made the same promise to Yushchenko yesterday in Kiev, where he told the press after his talks with Yushchenko that he had spoken to Putin by telephone recently and told him that he was "going to work as hard as I can to see to it that Ukraine and Georgia are accepted into MAP," but Russia had “nothing to fear” because NATO is a peaceful organization that helps democracies. Bush praised Kiev yesterday for the active role it played in NATO operations. He called Ukraine practically the only non-NATO state that is supporting all the alliance's missions, including in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was clearly exaggerating, since Ukraine withdrew its peacekeepers from Iraq in 2005 and never had a military presence in Afghanistan, only civilian specialists. It is possible that the American president intentionally overstated Kiev's services before the summit to make an impression on the opponents of Ukraine and Georgia's integration into NATO, since there is no consensus on the matter within NATO. Fundamental NATO members such as Germany, France and The Netherlands oppose the former Soviet republics' membership and have expressed their opposition repeatedly in recent days. They point out that there is no consensus within Ukraine on its NATO intentions, and Georgia has unresolved territorial conflicts. Saakashvili assessed the motives of the Western European countries in an interview with Kommersant. “European business has many connections with Russia and it, of course, pays attention to negative relations with Moscow. But Europe has already made such mistakes in the last century and paid heavily for them. The current generation of European politicians remembers those mistakes and is not likely to repeat them,” he said.