‘Resetting’ relations with Russia

last updated 8 January 2015

This week’s U.S.-Russia summit in Moscow has been billed as a chance to “reset” relations between the two countries, said Vladimir Ryzhkov in The Moscow Times. Stalemate is the more likely outcome. Our current Russian leaders are hung up on one issue: “re-establishing greater influence over the former Soviet republics.” They want President Obama to agree to a tacit divvying up of the world into “spheres of influence”—the very Cold War–era thinking that he has denounced. Meanwhile, Washington’s interests lie elsewhere—in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, coping with Iran and North Korea, and resolving the perennial Arab-Israeli conflict. Moscow has little to offer in any of these areas. “The hopes of resetting U.S.-Russian relations will be shattered by the two sides’ fundamental disagreements.”

The one big achievement of the summit was essentially “just PR,” said Dmitri Sidorov in Moscow’s Yezhedevny Zhurnal. That’s the agreement to cut nuclear weapons and conclude a new arms-control treaty. Neither side had anything to lose except inflated defense budgets, so it was easy to agree to reduce nuclear arsenals. That’s also why President Dmitri Medvedev conducted that portion of the discussion. The real talks, about oil and gas sales and pipelines, and the use of energy as a weapon against recalcitrant East European states, took place with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, still the most powerful Russian leader. And from what we can tell so far, not much was agreed on there.

Putin, in fact, is the main obstacle to any reset, said Yevgeny Kiselyov in The Moscow Times. During his two terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, U.S.-Russian relations “reached their lowest point since the Cold War,” largely due to his machinations. As prime minister, Putin still controls most Russian policy. Recall that last November, then-President Bush made an agreement with Medvedev that the U.S. and Russia would not erect protectionist trade barriers. “Literally a few days later, Putin announced the introduction of prohibitively high customs duties” on certain cars. So any agreement that Obama thinks he reached with Medvedev could easily be undercut by Putin—an example of the good cop, bad cop routine that the Kremlin has mastered.