The Oil and Glory Interview: Charles Clover on the Siloviki's Possibly Lesser Role

The conventional wisdom is that the foundation of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's power is the siloviki, the current and former intelligence and military officers who have been drawn into powerful political and commercial positions over the last decade. That's why I was surprised by a long piece last week by Charles Clover, the Financial Times' Moscow bureau chief and one of the clearest reporters on Russia. In it, Clover -- my former roommate in Almaty and Tashkent during the 1990s -- reports finding a diminishment in the siloviki's influence. Clover agreed to flesh out his conclusions for O&G. Here is the interview:

O&G: Charles, your latest long piece is decidedly contrarian. You report that Russia's siloviki – who others routinely describe as the ascendant power – actually hit their apex in 2007, and appear to be on the wane. Is that your takeaway? And if so, why do you think that's the case?

Clover: I should probably say in the spirit of full disclosure that I set out to write about how the siloviki are getting stronger – but when I started asking people who keep track of these things, some quoted, some anonymous, most said that actually things have reversed a bit. Now, whether this is a temporary or a permanent trend is of course an open question – I don’t know the answer, and I hope I put enough caveats to that effect in the piece! But I do think the siloviki may have gotten too powerful for their own good, and other groups are trying to cut them down to size. Putin, in appointing [President Dmitry] Medvedev as president, seems to have intended perhaps to rein in the siloviki a bit – his attitude is unclear. It’s useful to remember that in the 1990s, everyone thought the oligarchs were the ascendant power in the land – of course they are still very powerful, but they did not take over the state.

Q: Even so, you do not seem convinced that the siloviki's retrenchment necessarily equates to a greater responsiveness to the public at large, what you call "civil society." Why is that the case?

A: Russia's liberals are not a whole lot more liberal than the siloviki, and I think any 'thaw' will not be a very ambitious one. Nonetheless, there is a sense that things might have gone too far in the direction of autocracy, and Russians by and large want to live in a more normal country.

Q: President Medvedev has made what, compared with the government's previous attitude, are some bold decisions in the Sergei Magnitsky case. Do you yourself regard these as surprising or bold decisions? Do they signal anything larger? What's the context?

A: I think all we can do is wait and see where things go. Yes the developments are surprising, and seem to indicate a shift in the mentality at the Kremlin. There also does seem to be a struggle within law enforcement agencies over this case in particular – though it’s a bit inside baseball to write about this yet. The context is useful to keep in mind though – Russia for the first time in years needs to borrow abroad and is trying to attract foreign investment, so it needs to be seen to be doing something about this case involving a huge portfolio investor, Hermitage Capital. I'm not sure if all they are doing is trying to be seen to do something, or actually doing something though.

Q: Ultimately is this shift significant in terms of how Russians live, and how foreign governments interact with Russia? For instance, are we likely to see a soft-and-cuddly Gazprom? Or friendship break out with Georgia?

A: As I said, I don’t see Russia's "liberals" as much more liberal than the conservatives, though that is a whole different article to write. And I don’t think the siloviki are going to be entirely pushed out of course, just reduced a bit. I doubt Gazprom will start giving out free gas and I don’t expect to see [Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili getting invited to the Kremlin any time soon.

Q: You describe Putin's circle of "Orthodox Chekists," referring to their regular audiences with a conservative Russian Orthodox monk named Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov. What's the takeaway from this relationship?

A: Kind of like the Bush White House and the religious right – It’s hard to tell how much of this is PR and spin, and how much is genuine ideological sympathy. Archimandrite Tikhon leads a very conservative wing of the Orthodox church, and I think the church generally supports conservative political figures on ideological grounds.

Q: You also say that Igor Sechin – who has seemed fairly influential in a lot of matters including politics and oil – as assuming less influence in his role as a deputy prime minister. Is title so important? Has Sechin's influence truly waned? After all, he still runs Rosneft.

A: I totally agree with your premise – I don't think title is so important. What is important, however, is access to Putin, which Sechin in his previous incarnation had every day – he controlled access to the president and that was his main "resource,” as a former senior Kremlin official put it in a conversation with me. Today, he doesn't have such access, as his position requires a lot of travel, and he has other responsibilities. He remains immensely powerful, but in a more limited sphere – energy. He is not the universal figure he was in the Kremlin.

Q: What does this phenomenon signal about Putinism, the long projected arc of Putin's influence into the next couple of decades?

A: I think I talked about this in the piece (I hope that part didn’t get cut). I think Putin certainly continues to play the hegemonic role in Russian politics. But equally he is a skilled politician who knows that he cannot allow any one faction in government to get too big, as this would threaten his own ability to play the most powerful role. I think if the siloviki see a decline, it is likely Putin's own decision.

Radio Appearance

I was interviewed about murder and death in Russia on My Technology Lawyer, a radio show hosted by Andrew Kreig and Scott Draughton.

Religiosity and the Meaning of the Shift on Missile Defense

One is pressed to name a technology attached to as much religious-like fervor as missile defense. We of course are not talking the type of fanaticism seen in the lines around the block to buy the latest iPod, but truly mob-like anger resembling the debate over evolution. It's been that way ever since Ronald Reagan gave missile defense national prominence in 1983. A quarter century later, while the defense industry continues to work toward a breakthrough that would make the technology reliable, the news in Eastern Europe and Russia brings missile defense back front and center in all its passion and vitriol -- Obama has canceled George W. Bush's planned missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, and to the technology's advocates, that means heresy.

As we have discussed previously at O&G, Obama has been bound to make just this move simply because of the irrationality of attempting to persuade Iran or anyone else that Europe is held safe by a non-working technology. In a column today in The New York times, here's how Defense Secretary Robert Gates himself describes the attacks against him since the decision: "I have found since taking this post that when it comes to missile defense, some hold a view bordering on theology that regards any change of plans or any cancellation of a program as abandonment or even breaking faith."

So what is this lathered-up debate genuinely about? It is whether or not there will be any resulting dividends from Moscow as a result. Naturally, the Obama Administration denies any link to Russia, and technically that assertion is correct -- the cancellation I think would have taken place regardless of the friction with Russia.

But payback is nevertheless an issue -- Russia remains an outlier on extremely important matters, including the troubling arc of developments in Iran. Looked through that lens, Obama can be expected to act to eliminate other irritants, too, that have no legitimate U.S. strategic value.

Hence, look next for a trade opening with Moscow -- there's no valid reason to block Russia from the World Trade Organization if it meets the criteria. But don't expect the U.S. to back down in Georgia -- among other factors, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline continues to link Georgia strategically to the West. The U.S. will probably also continue to pursue the strategic Nabucco natural gas pipeline despite the lack of enough fuel to make it work.

While both of Russia's leaders -- President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin -- suggest that they will be more attentive now to U.S. concerns, my friend Masha Lipman at Carnegie in Moscow remarks that "anything that looks like a concession can be viewed by the Russian side as a sign of weakness."

Generally speaking, Lipman is right. But the reduction in the points of friction between Washington and Moscow is still arguably a valid approach to getting Russia on side.

Russia and Bending: What Biden Didn't Say

Last Friday, O&G wrote of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's strong grasp of reality in the former Soviet Union, as expressed in his actions in Ukraine and Georgia. But yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to sweep up in the wake of a later, widely remarked-upon Wall Street Journal interview with the vice president, headlined, "Biden Says Weakened Russia Will Bend to U.S." Clinton's remarks on a Sunday talk show came after a senior adviser to President Dmitri Medvedev asked, "Who is shaping the U.S. foreign policy, the president or respectable members of his team?"

The Russian official, Sergei Prikhodko, said he found the Journal story "perplexing." I do too, but for different reasons: Unless Biden said something more than is in the story and the excerpts posted on the Journal website, he didn't suggest that Russia will accede to U.S. wishes.

This is important because, bluntly speaking, the Journal headline and the follow-on reporting by The New York Times make Biden look wholly misinformed. This isn't nuance -- if Biden truly meant what the Journal reports he did, Mike McFaul, the National Security Council's Russia hand, needs to get over to the Executive Office Building and have a little chat with him.

The Journal story, written by Peter Spiegel, synthesizes Biden's remarks as such: The seriously weakened Russian economy will "force the country to make accommodations to the West on a wide range of national security issues, including loosening its grip on former Soviet republics and shrinking its vast nuclear arsenal."

Within the story, we get this quote: "I think we vastly underestimate the hand that we hold." The story goes on with this Biden quote: "Russia has to make some very difficult, calculated decisions. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years. They're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable."

To summarize, Biden thinks that the Obama administration has underplayed its leverage as Russia suffers from a profoundly weak economy and disastrous demographics. On the merits of the assertion, I'd argue that the U.S. has not underestimated its leverage -- to suggest that the U.S. can parlay Russian impoverishment into changed Kremlin policy on Iran, on missile defense, on European gas policy, and so on, is simply a misread of Russia. But this is beside the point. Biden does not predict Russian capitulation. It's not in the quotes.

Now to the Journal's second point -- that Biden suggested that Russia will loosen its grip on former Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine.

Biden says the following: "I don't expect the Russians to embrace -- particularly this government, particularly Putin -- to embrace the notion that [they should] reject a sphere of influence. But I do expect them to understand we don't accept a sphere of influence."

Fair enough -- Moscow ought to recognize that Washington won't shift a position on Central Asia, on the Caucasus, and on the other Slavic states that's existed since George H.W. Bush's administration. But where is the prediction of a Russian accommodation to the West's position? It doesn't appear in the quotes as far as I can see.

This isn't Biden's finest moment. But it's a problem of a different order from what one would conclude from the Journal headline and lead.

Murder and Ramzan Kadyrov

The Washington Post's Philip Pan puts today's murder of Russian activist Natalya Estemirova within the context of a string of slayings of the foes of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. Estemirova was among many who accused Kadyrov of running an exceptionally brutal and murderous regime.

For hours, the blogosphere has been replete with reports on Estemirova's kidnapping and murder, so all we do here is attempt some context. Just three days ago, O&G used the occasion of the five-year anniversary of another Russian slaying -- that of American reporter Paul Klebnikov -- to note the multiple forces in Russia that conspire to keep killers safe from justice. President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered a priority investigation into Estemirova's killing, but until now the Kremlin has been among the forces protecting murderers. Simply put, no major slaying that I can think of has been solved in Russia since the Soviet breakup.

The highest-profile critic of Kadyrov to be murdered was reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was slain in 2006. Here are a few victims of just the last year: Umar Israilov, a former Kadyrov bodyguard, was shot down in Vienna on January 13. Six days later, Stanley Markelov, a lawyer who represented the family of a woman murdered in Chechnya, was shot dead in Moscow. Two months later, Sulim Yamadayev, a former commander in Chechnya, was killed in Dubai. Yamadayev's brother, Ruslan, a political rival of Kadyrov's, had been shot dead in Moscow the previous September.

That's a good start for any genuine investigation.

Post-Mortem on Obama in Moscow: The Greater Attractions of a Harley

The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman today puts together the four major policy speeches that President Barack Obama has made abroad -- in Cairo to a Muslim audience; in Prague to Eastern Europeans; in Ghana to Africans; and now in Moscow to Russians. Weisman's takeaway is that Obama is combining "tough" and "love" overseas -- respect for other cultures with demand for concessions on big issues.

I myself noted that Obama didn't get much traction in Moscow. My former Washington Post colleague Masha Lipman regards it as an important speech, and speaks similarly to Weisman in terms of Obama's message in Moscow. "Obama was delicate and subtle, as well as firm and concrete," she wrote in the Post.



Lipman suggests that one reason the speech went under-appreciated in Russia is that it wasn't broadcast live. Russian commenters to her column helpfully provide a link to the translated Russian broadcast of the speech on state-owned Vesti-24. Here is the full broadcast for Russian-speaking readers.



Finally, Lucky Barker, a Lipman commenter with a wicked sense of humor, poses the possibility that Obama was simply upstaged. As it turns out, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin followed his breakfast with Obama that morning with a televised visit to a local biker's club.

The Murder of Paul Klebnikov, and a Tormented Juror

Ellen Barry of The New York Times weighs in today with an interesting five-year anniversary story on the assassination of Forbes correspondent Paul Klebnikov, the New York native who was shot in the back as he walked to the Metro across the street from his office. The angle is an interview with Alexei Rybin, a juror in the 2006 trial that acquitted three suspects. Rybin is tormented because he believes that guilty men went free.

The trial itself seemed destined not to produce an objectively reached verdict. In one passage, Barry describes jurors watching from a window "as a witness fled the courthouse pursued by five men in masks, then was tackled, handcuffed and put in the back of a van."

The piece describes the multiple forces that confound justice. Yes, Russia is still unaccustomed to the jury system, and politics infuses and interferes with jurisprudence. In addition, there is much speculation that the jury was tampered with -- for instance, neighbors of the jurors whispered in their ears that the men were innocent, and they apparently listened.

With President Barack Obama in Moscow last week, the Russians agreed to a joint investigation with U.S. detectives in the case. Yet, a little over a week earlier, Petros Garibyan, the highly skilled investigator of the murders of both Klebnikov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, wrote a letter telling Klebnikov's lawyers that their probe was over. At the New Yorker, Keith Gessen writes about the problems with both the Klebnikov and Politkovskaya trials.

As we've discussed here previously, as well as in Putin's Labyrinth, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has at minimum enabled the system of unpunished murder, and President Dmitry Medvedev isn't willing to challenge him on it.

Obama in Moscow: A Cool Reception, and a Dose of Putin

President Barack Obama employed his signature moves -- the candid town hall address; the glamorous wife and daughters -- and to be sure Russian President Dmitry Medvedev seemed to lap it up. But in the end Russia is not Cairo, nor Berlin. This is not 1994, when then-President Bill Clinton led some Moscow women to swoon. In place of the intrigued, still-fascinated eyes of the 1990s, Obama was met largely with disinterest from the Russian public, and the wagging finger of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in private. In short, he fell flat.

That's a dose of reality. In the best of times, on most topics, the best that can be expected in a U.S.-Russia relationship is probably respectful disagreement.

“We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” 25-year-old Kirill Zagorodnov, a student at Moscow's New Economic School, told Clifford Levy and Ellen Barry of The New York Times. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.”

Stefan Wagstyl of the Financial Times heard the same story from the students he collared after Obama's speech at the school yesterday. But Nikolai Petrov of Moscow's Carnegie Center also cautioned Wagstyl not to go too far with his analysis: "These students are not typical. They are mostly mathematics specialists," Petrov said.

While this slap of reality was telling, probably the most important meeting of Obama's Moscow trip was his two-hour breakfast with Putin. By Wagstyl's description, it appears that Putin put on one of his bravura performances. Putin has been wowing Westerners for years with his three-hour, no-notes discourses on Russian affairs at the annual Valdai Discussion Club. Now Obama got a taste of Putin's presence of mind.

Obama's takeaway? Putin is "tough, smart, shrewd, very unsentimental, very pragmatic." And also in charge.

U.S.-Russia Summit: Warmer Temperatures in Moscow

The chief takeaway of the U.S.-Russia summit is that it's been all upside, and no downside, for the leaders of both countries: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev got to tally up respect points from hanging out and negotiating nuclear arms reductions with President Barack Obama; and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin got to stare fiercely at the American president (video). From Obama's side, he got to take down the temperature with Moscow, Washington's loudest European critic.

Yet nothing that happened in Moscow shifts the shape of world events as they were when Obama arrived there. For instance, the two sides could do nothing to change the direction of events just south of Russia, in Iran.

The State Department has denied that Vice President Joe Biden has given Israel the go-ahead to fly over Iraq and attack Iran. That's not what Biden meant when he said in an interview Sunday that the U.S. won't stand in Israel's way were it to attack Iran, the State Department asserts. In the closing weeks of his presidency, George W. Bush refused to grant such permission. An Iranian official replies that Tehran will mount a "real and decisive" response to any such attack.

This could be mere brinksmanship. Israel itself is pushing the U.S. to put together a fresh set of "crippling sanctions," according to Michael Crowley at The Plank.

Ria Misra at Inside Politics suggests that an ideological split that's just become public in the religious center of Qom "may be the critical leverage that finally forces not only the overturning of the [June 12 presidential] election results, but maybe of the ayatollah as well." She is talking about a critical statement issued Sunday by a reformist clerical group called the Association of Scholars and Researchers of Qom Seminary. Kathy Kattenburg at The Moderate Voice is also impressed with the development.

This could be another bout of getting carried away, as pundits and the media did leading up to the Iranian election. In fact, as Najmeh Bozorgmehr reports in the Financial Times, the most powerful clerical group in Qom, the Society of Scholars of Qom Seminary, issued a simultaneous statement congratulating Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his official re-election.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Mir Hosein Mousavi's outspoken appearance yesterday in public -- the first time he has been publicly cited in three weeks -- is bound to stir up more turbulence. That will offer up a chance for Obama and Medvedev to exercise their new-found camaraderie.

Obama, Medvedev and Obduracy in Moscow

Look for presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev to emerge from their long hours of summitry this week massaging each other's shoulders, and riffing on their personal chemistry. While expressing the usual caveats, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will probably do the same. They will carefully avoid the soul-gazing verbage of George W. Bush, but the meaning will be similar.

That diplomatic lubrication won't make either side yield on the respective postures that mainly irritate the other side: Despite the knowledge that a U.S. missile defense system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic doesn't work, Obama isn't going to outright renounce its deployment, not without a fairly serious tradeoff from Moscow (and it's hard to imagine what that would be); and Medvedev won't relinquish Russia's insistence on a continued sphere of influence that includes the Caucasus, Central Asia and Ukraine, even if Obama outright cedes the right of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, which one can't picture him doing.

Certainly Obama isn't going to drive a wedge between Medvedev and Putin, nor drive the prime minister from influence, as seems to be the push in Washington. Obama should get accustomed to the apparent fact that Medvedev and Putin simply see eye to eye -- perhaps by necessity -- on most subjects.

Perhaps this is as it should be. My Business Week colleague Jason Bush and I write in this week's magazine on the business agenda for the summit. But in traditional Washington-Moscow relations, progress is made on the edges of obduracy. And in fact neither side wants much from the other. Washington would like more Russian cooperation on its initiatives; Moscow would like more respect.

On Obama's Plate in Moscow: Iran and Breakfast With Putin

The philosophical underpinning of President Obama's arms-control agenda in Russia next week is that -- by allowing Moscow to preen on-stage, reviving its former role as a superpower state, ostensibly regulating peace in the world -- Russia will be more amenable to persuasion on other topics.

But does this reasoning hold? Will Moscow see things Washington's way on the Caspian, on Georgia, and on the balance of petro-power in Europe?

More important at the moment, could Moscow decouple from Iran, with which it has maintained an alliance of poking-fingers-in-the-U.S.-chest? Now that the chances for a game-changing U.S. opening with Iran have been all-but eliminated by the after-election crackdown in Tehran, is there anything to be done before Israel, for instance, decides it can no longer wait for Iran to become a nuclear state?

I've surveyed some old Russia and foreign policy hands from the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations, and the answer comes back that, at least on Iran, Moscow either can't or won't be able to help restrain Tehran. As for petro-power and the Caspian -- Moscow is capitalizing on the global financial crisis to re-assert power in its struggling neighborhood, and will push back on any attempt to deny it regional domination.

Steve Sestanovich, ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union under President Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that Moscow is already effectively cooperating with U.S. aims on Iran -- while it committed to finishing Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor and providing S-300 missiles, Moscow for years has failed to deliver either. "Their policy is to avoid annoying anybody too much," Sestanovich says. "The middle ground allows them to make a lot of money. And they hold in reserve a role as a possible diplomatic mediator if the U.S. or Iran indicate they are reconsidering their position."

Georgetown Professor Angela Stent, a former State Department and National Intelligence Council expert on the region, just got off the plane from Moscow yesterday. She says that Russian officials and experts have a mixed view of Iran -- the latter say that Russia can live with a nuclear Iran, just as it lives with a nuclear Pakistan and India; and the former say they don't believe that Tehran is anywhere near obtaining nuclear capability.

Whatever the case, seeking Russian help on Iran is misguided, Stent suggests. "Russia doesn't have the power to deliver Iran," she says.

A former Bush administration official who preferred to speak not for attribution said that any stiffer sanctions -- even if the Europeans and Russia were to agree -- "would not work quickly enough." "They are on the threshold" of nuclear capability, this official said, and this again raises the possibility of an attack by Israel on Iran.

Interestingly, Obama administration officials still talk of the possibility of negotiations with Iran. That seems to ignore political reality both in Iran -- Sestanovich notes that Iranian officials themselves seem publicly at least not to welcome further talks -- and the U.S., where Obama could face a buzz-saw of criticism should he be seen as equivocating after the bloody aftermath to the June 12th Iranian presidential election.

Obama will spend some 10 hours with President Dmitry Medvedev while in Moscow. But on Tuesday, Obama is also going to have a private breakfast for an hour or an hour-and-a-half with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Obama told The Associated Press that Putin "has one foot in the old ways," while Medvedev understands "that the old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations are outdated." This is a nice public relations setup, but not likely to result in any progress -- Medvedev has done nothing so far to indicate any separation from Putin on foreign policy, and there's no reason I can think of to believe that he will.

The former Bush administration official asserted that Obama shouldn't dignify Putin's behind-the-curtain grip on power by spending time with him; technically speaking, only Medvedev is on the same protocol level, this thinking goes. For that reason, this former official told me, Bush didn't meet with Putin once he was no longer president and began serving as prime minister. That's technically correct but disingenuous. In fact, just prior to Putin's stepping down, Bush violated his own rule precluding meetings with other heads of state unless there was a concrete deliverable to be achieved: Bush did so by flying out to Putin's vacation home at Sochi, hence delivering much prestige to the Russian leader but nothing for the U.S.

Stent says rightly that it's not realistic to ignore Putin. "To move the agenda forward, you have to meet with both of them," she told me. "It wouldn't make sense not to meet with Putin."

Indeed, rolling back a few years earlier, when Bush's father went to Moscow as U.S. president, he met with both Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his antagonist-for-Soviet-power, Boris Yeltsin, who was then the mere president of the component state of Russia.

Putin is not ignorable, any more than Russia, as usual, keeps itself in the diplomatic game by its willingness to play the outsider.

Labyrinth Out in Paperback

The updated version of Putin's Labyrinth is out today. It brings events in Russia up to date, including the collapse of the economic miracle with the plunge in oil prices and the global financial crisis, and the January natural gas stand-off with Ukraine. This version is also indexed. Your comments are welcomed.

A Front-Row Seat to Momentous Events. The Oil and Glory Interview: Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha

Albania has had a prime view of some of the most dramatic events in Europe of the last decade and more. Most recently, they have included the West's showdown with Russia over Kosovo's independence, which led directly to Moscow's effective absorption of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In addition, while Russia has opposed further expansion of NATO, Albania along with Croatia became the alliance's newest members three weeks ago.

When I was last in Albania – during NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbian troops in Kosovo – I had a great time, but the country was overrun with criminal gangs. There were Mercedeses everywhere – all of them absent license plates since Albania served as the way-station for stolen vehicles traversing Europe. It also was a smuggling route for people of all sorts seeking to migrate illegally to Europe; I watched a couple of boatloads of these migrants traveling fast late one evening on to Italy. Today, with the country a NATO member and seeking to join the EU, those old days seem largely gone.

Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha has traversed this entire period. A 65-year-old trained cardiologist, he was Albanian president for five years during the 1990s, before losing the post in a huge investment scandal. After ten years in the opposition, he returned to power in 2005. I called Berisha in his Tirana office. The edited interview:

O&G – The International Monetary Fund calls Albania “highly vulnerable.” Yet it is one of the few economies in the world expected not to shrink this year. How is the country withstanding the financial crisis? How are remittances from Albanians abroad holding up?

Berisha – I have high esteem for the IMF. But it should not [encourage] a panic. It’s not helpful, in my view. I told them, ‘Look, you’re a very, very crucial institution. I’m glad that the G20 provided you with a new role.’ But many governments are hesitant to work with them because their scheme at a time of social unrest could create more problems than it solves. I don’t consider the [Albanian] economy as highly vulnerable. It’s a real economy. Remittances are not coming [to the same degree] because of the loss of jobs in Greece and Italy. But we are encouraging tourism.

Q – Is NATO membership a right? Russia, while opposing Kosovo independence, for instance, has vigorously opposed NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, and made that a benchmark for good relations with the West.

A – For my country, NATO membership was the most important achievement since independence day. Albania suffered more than any country from security problems. It suffered from isolation and self-isolation. It was an orphan nation. Now it’s part of an alliance. We have all the potential to build freedom. It means high credibility for Albania in the world. It is high credibility for investors. Albania will never walk alone.

Q – Is NATO membership a right?

A – For a free nation, yes. NATO proved to be a shield of nations. NATO has faced no difficulty adapting to the new situation. It has brought freedom everywhere.

Q – Is it valid for Russia to make good relations with it contingent on opposing NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine?

A – I know no country that is afraid of Russia. I know only countries that are willing to work with Russia. Based on some imperial heritage, if you go into their history, expansion is in their psychology. What effect would Georgia or Ukraine have on Russia? What effect would NATO expansion have on Russia? [The assertion of a NATO threat to Russia] is nonsense. It will take time, but with realism [Georgian and Ukrainian membership] will happen.

Q – The decisive factor in deciding who should be a member of NATO is whether it would send troops to defend that country, Article V of the NATO charter. Would NATO defend Ukraine or Georgia if need be?

A – Is Russia intending to attack Ukraine or Georgia? If Russia intends to partake an aggression, NATO must firmly stand, because that would mean the new Russification of Europe.

Q – What is your view of the August war between Russia and Georgia?

A – Who attacked first is unclear. But a [Russian] scenario was there to invade Georgia. The Russians moved not only into Ossetia. They moved into Abkhazia, and toward Tbilisi. Russia probably wanted to occupy Georgia. The stand of the international community worked.

Q – How will Albania respond to President Obama’s call for more NATO troops in Afghanistan?

A – Albania is sending a new company, doubling our current number of troops. We also sent 20 nurses and doctors.

Q – Is Afghanistan a threat for NATO countries?

A – Afghanistan and Pakistan must both be helped. It is difficult terrain. Politics at home aren’t easy. But I think the strategy will be effective. The U.S. sent a man over there who is highly skilled in negotiations.

Q – [Richard] Holbrooke?

A – Yes. Holbrooke. It’s very important to promote peace there.

Q – Unlike elsewhere in Europe, President Bush seemed highly popular when he visited Albania in 2007. Can you explain why?

A – First, he was the first U.S. president to visit my country. Second, we suffered more than any country from dictatorship. So we definitely support toppling dictators, including Saddam Hussain and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar. Third, he came with great messages here – support for Kosovo independence, and NATO membership for us.

Medvedev's Signal: Don't Kill Novaya Gazeta Reporters

Dmitry Medvedev has noted in the past that Russians tend to look for signals from their leaders. But, since the Russian president doesn't come from the siloviki -- he is a former law professor, not a retired KGB or military officer -- nor from politics, he is not as noted as his predecessors for skillfully communicating through gesture.

So what was today all about? Why did Medvedev give Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov bragging rights for publishing his first Russian newspaper interview (English version)?

My own thinking is that Medvedev is right -- to some degree, ruling in Russia is about signals, often informing a power group or an individual to watch its or his step. And one signal that's been clear over the last several years is that certain murders can take place with impunity -- killers somehow have correctly understood that they will not be held to account.

Novaya Gazeta, long the fiercest critic of Vladimir Putin's rule, wears its bloody past on its sleeve. To this day, the home page of its English-language web site is a full-page tribute to its fallen. They include Igor Domnikov, killed in 2000, Yuri Shchekochikhin, who died in 2003 from a mysterious illness, and, most dramatically, Anna Politkovskaya, slain in 2006.

There had been something of an interregnum since the November 2006 nuclear poisoning murder of Alexander Litvinenko. But in January, that apparent intermission ended. Human rights lawyer Stanislaw Markelov was shot in the back of the head by a killer on a crowded Moscow street in daylight, along with Anastasia Baburova, a Novaya Gazeta reporter who tried to intervene. Being abroad still doesn't make one safe. Last month, Chechen Sulim Yamadayev was shot dead in Dubai.

Medvedev is saying that he's a break from the past -- at a minimum, he doesn't support the targeting of Muratov's reporters. Indeed, this was Medvedev's second such signal -- he met with Muratov in January to mourn the Markelov-Baburina murders.

It's unclear that Russia's killers will honor the signal, nor whether Medvedev is yet a leader whose signals are generally respected. After all, the system of unpunished murder has seemed larger than even ultra-powerful Putin, who publicly mourned the death of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov, whose murder nonetheless was never solved.

Yet, the gesture was clear.

Reset: Russia, yes; Iran, Kinda

Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance and implementation, will be the chief U.S. negotiator for nuclear arms reductions with Russia. The goal is to sign a completed deal by Dec. 15, when Start I expires.

That's not a surprise -- Gottemoeller negotiated one of Washington's single most-important successes in the post-Soviet era, which was the removal during the Clinton administration of 4,000 nuclear warheads from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

It's also not a surprise that presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev today made the re-negotiation of Start I the core of a reset of U.S.-Russia relations. Arms reduction, highly favored in Russia, "is the most productive vehicle to start with," Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University, told me by phone. "It doesn't mean we will be finished by December, but the statement provides which systems will be included" in the talks.

Yet in a post-mortem with reporters, two senior U.S. officials seemed downright giddy after today's meeting between Obama and Medvedev in London, where the Group of 20 summit will be held tomorrow. One reason was that the two leaders were even able to agree on a final agenda going forward; and second was a stronger agreement on how to deal with Iran's nuclear program.

All of this has an economic component -- energy. Geopolitics in the region are highly inter-connected: Better relations with Russia can help fertilize the ground toward a thaw of U.S. relations with Iran, which could then significantly improve global natural gas supplies, particularly to Europe, which is highly dependent on -- who else? -- Russia. It's all fairly circular. Iran has the world's second-largest natural gas reserves, and whenever the financial crisis tamps down, Europe's energy thirst is going to resume its rise.

What Obama officials said on the four-page Obama-Medvedev statement itself: "I'll tell you honestly, I was not optimistic when we started this process of negotiating this that we would get it done for this meeting. ... It started very differently several weeks ago, and that he got his government to engage in it in a very serious way and get it done in time for our meeting today I think is a statement of the possibilities in U.S.-Russian relations."

And on the statement's position on Iran: "I've dealt with [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov over the last several weeks and they've always said Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon -- 'We have no evidence of that; show me that this is there.' And this was a different tone than that."

The two sides will continue to meet ahead of a planned Obama trip to Moscow in July.

In a blog post at Democracy Arsenal, Adam Blickstein seems as delighted as the Clinton officials. Matthew Yglesias is of a similar mind.

On Iran, progress isn't as clear-cut. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made much of a brief conversation yesterday in The Hague between U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh. The diplomats were all there as part of a parlay on Afghanistan.

Michael van der Galien of PoliGazette blogged on that the encounter was significant, as simple as it was. John Boonstra at UN Dispatch thinks it's good news that Iran is even "in the mix."

Alas today, Iran denied that the Holbrooke-Akhunzadeh encounter took place. The political ground in Tehran is apparently not as far along toward a thaw than it is in the U.S.

This must be why experts say a true rapprochment between Washington and Tehran will be years away.

The Oil and Glory Interview: Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev is on one of his regular swings through the West. I caught up with him in Washington, where he appeared at the Reconciliation Forum, a conference sponsored by the Americas Business Council.

This time, the trip coincides with the 20th anniversary of the first vivid signs of the coming Soviet collapse, culminating in the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Given the state of global finance, triggered by the U.S. banking crisis, Gorbachev is doing not a little bit of gloating.

Speaking before an audience today in Washington, Gorbachev called Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili "a puppet of the United States." I asked him whether he regarded the financial crisis as a comeuppance for the U.S. He said yes, and later offered up that the worsening war in Afghanistan, too, is just desserts for Washington.

Here is the story in Business Week. Here is the transcript of the interview.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

Why has Russia's natural gas dispute with Ukraine stretched out so long?

A key reason is the subtext from Russia's side: an effort once and for all to tar and discredit much-detested neighbors who have become darlings of the West, and end the West's intrusion into Moscow's claimed sphere of influence.

Despite some self-inflicted damage, the gambit so far has been relatively successful.

In the fall, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his junior partner, President Dmitry Medvedev, managed through skillful public relations to turn their full-scale invasion of Georgia into a reflection on the sanity of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. It was one of those kernel-of-truth cases -- Saakashvili in fact is a rash, immature leader (and may indeed have initiated the original fighting in South Ossetia that preceded Russia's invasion of Georgia proper).
Saakashvili's personality flaws hardly justified Russia's seizure of the Georgian port of Poti and the bombing of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline route, and Putin and Medvedev suffered black eyes. Yet Saakashvili's image in the West and at home was severely -- and perhaps permanently -- damaged. (And, not incidentally, the U.S. was revealed to be largely impotent in what it had hubristically claimed as a pro-Western new region.)

Now, Putin and Medvedev have in their sights another primary local irritant -- Ukraine and its independent-minded president, Viktor Yushchenko. In the latest part of this effort, the Russian leaders are trying to recruit Europe into a strategy of reducing their new dispute with Ukraine to this: Ukraine is a country-size thief.

On its face, what we have is a simple pricing dispute. Ukraine wants to pay close to today's price for its 2009 natural gas supplies, or about $180-$235 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas. But Russia wants Ukraine to agree to what its other European customers are paying based on long-ago negotiated contracts, or about $400 per 1,000 cubic meters.

We've previously discussed the role of personal gain in confounding a settlement to what elsewhere is usually a utility dispute. The two sides seem no nearer to resolving the central pricing disagreement, but increasingly cold Europe has stepped in to at least restore the flow of gas.

Here's where the charges of thievery enter. Russia says it won't restart the general flow of gas because Ukraine is siphoning off volumes for itself; Ukraine denies the accusation, and says it's simply isolating a bit of the gas -- so-called technical gas -- in order to get pressure into the line. Today, Putin and Medvedev met with Europeans in Moscow in an ostensible attempt to break the logjam, but failed.

Here's what Russia proposes: a consortium of European countries will "buy" the technical gas, and thereby "share the risk" with Russia. Italy, Russia's usual partner in its energy-based geopolitical strategies, is the sole foreign recruit thus far.

What would be the outcome of such a consortium if it does fully materialize? It would give de facto international validation to Russia's claim that Ukraine is so untrustworthy that a European consortium is required to mitigate the risk of doing business with it.

It would come again with some damage -- the dispute will go on until the two sides agree on a price, and meanwhile Putin, Medvedev Gazprom and Russia itself would look unreliable.

Yet, strategically Russia would also bring disrepute on a neighbor that until now has enjoyed an irritatingly good image outside the region.

If any of Europe's most important nations were still seriously considering either Ukraine or Georgia as potential members of NATO, these last few months will have made them less open to the idea.

Georgia: (Not Yet) All the Facts

Last week, Russia got a big p.r. boost when Chris Chivers and Ellen Barry wrote a detailed page-one piece in The New York Times backing up its version of how the five-day August war in Georgia began. In a nutshell, the piece concluded that the Georgians started it.

The war was momentous in a number of ways -- it all-but shut off the possibility that Georgia will get into NATO; it put a cloud of doubt over U.S. influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia; it may have accelerated the flight of western capital from Russia; and it turned the heaviest dose of western invective on Russia since the 2006 polonium murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

But now RFE-RL says it's more complicated than that. The Georgians may have fired before Russian troops arrived, according to a report today by Eka Tsamalashvili and Brian Whitmore, but their assault came days after South Ossetians began to shell local Georgian villages. The report says it's based on dozens of eye-witness accounts by RFE-RL reporters.

Both reports are worth reading. Together, they mean that, not surprisingly, there's much in the way of indignant showmanship to the claims by both sides. I haven't seen a definitive report as yet.

Labyrinth On-Line Today at Fire Dog Lake

I've been invited by the book salon at Fire Dog Lake for a discussion of Labyrinth. Join us from 5 p.m.-7 p.m. EST today. Jerome Guillet -- the French investment banker who blogs as Jerome a Paris -- will be today's host. There are no limits to the subjects. See you there.

Murder Experts in Houston

I've been researching and talking about murder for the best of two years now, but only last night encountered what must be the greatest concentration of part-time homicide experts in the United States. The encounter was at Murder By The Book, an incredible independent Houston bookstore whose managers say they are the largest shop in the U.S. specializing in murder thrillers.

Linda Wuest, the head of the Houston World Affairs Council, invited me to the store to talk about Putin's Labyrinth, and there I met wall to wall murder fans. Murder may be grisly, but to this sturdy gang, it's also a hobby.

For the like-minded among you, the managers suggested the following two Russian murder thrillers: Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 and Brent Ghelfi's Volk's Game.

The Sweep of Georgia's Impact

I'm just back from two weeks in Kazakhstan, looking at the ripples from the events in Georgia. The short takeaway is that Russia's short, victorious war will be felt for years to come all the way from Central Asia to western Europe. Here is the piece in this week's Business Week.



What doesn't seem to be much appreciated is that the main problem isn't really Georgia. It's that Georgia is the thread hanging off the tattered sweater; you pull it, and the sweater falls apart. Not counting the suddenly transformed politics of the Eurasian continent, but just economics, will Azerbaijan and Georgia manage to widen the Caucasus energy corridor to accommodate another 1.5 million barrels a day of Kazakh oil over the coming years, as Kazakhstan would like? What of hopes to diversify Europe's natural gas supply? The answer to both is "perhaps," but that Russia will have to be accommodated.

What would Russia want in exchange for allowing the corridor expansion to go through? For starters, as it's made plain, it wants all of the Azerbaijan state's natural gas supply, the very same volumes that the State Department is pushing President Ilham Aliyev to ship to Europe. As for Kazakhstan, it's not clear what it will be asked -- President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the balancer of great powers, has already been so deferential to Vladimir Putin that one wonders what more there is to surrender. From Europe, Putin would like continued demand for Russian gas at current or greater volumes.

One thing that's sure is that Russia doesn't have to use its Army again. Having deployed it once, Putin has made his point. Besides, Russian energy pipelines provide it all the leverage it needs without its army.

While You Were Involved in War

In the midst of Vladimir Putin's land grab in Georgia, BP suffered another blow in its oilfield tussle in Russia. Last week, a Russian court barred Robert Dudley, the CEO of BP's joint venture in Russia, from running the company for two years. Now BP is trying to figure out how to secure its Russian assets, which account for a quarter of the company's global production.

BP and its partners at TNK-BP -- four Russian oligarchs who are mainly financiers and bankers -- have been in a dispute since spring. In a nutshell, the Russians value the company for the dividends it pays out; BP sees the company as more of a growth play, and wants to plow as much of the oil profit as possible back into the company. While that sounds like a balancing act managed at almost all companies around the world, it's turned ugly in this case.

As O and G readers know, I see this brawl ending badly for BP. Given the pressure the Russians have brought to bear, with the obvious collusion of the Kremlin (it's absurd to claim, as the Russian partners have, that an army of inspectors could have a free-for-all at the company unless the Kremlin were okay with it), I don't see how BP comes out with anywhere near its current 50% share of TNK-BP.

Indeed I think it's entirely possible that the British company is forced out entirely. In that case, BP itself -- meaning the global oil company -- is at risk; Wall Street will pummel its share price, and that would make it a vulnerable target for takeover. Some predict that Shell is the likeliest suitor, and I agree.

The partners are scheduled to meet to brawl again face to face on Sept. 25.

Dima's Moment

Dmitri Medvedev is trying desperately to recover from failing his first test as Russia's president: After suffering a severe case of deer-in-the-headlights 11 days ago, and leaving it to Vladimir Putin to blow the trumpet of war against Georgia from the Olympics in Beijing, Medvedev now is practicing a swagger, a sneer, and presidential gutter talk.

When Medvedev was with French President Nicolas Sarkozy a few days ago, he managed to form his lawyerly mouth into the words "bastards" and "hoodlums." In another setting, he threatened a "crushing response" to any future uprising such as the Georgians displayed. After all, the Georgians were people who got "idiotic ideas in their heads."

I have been predicting that Medvedev's performance will lead to his replacement on the 2012 presidential ticket. Putin surely won't tolerate a leader indecisive at the moment of truth, and will find someone else to run (I'm among those who believe that Putin wants to rule from the prime minister's seat so as not to have to keep leaving the seat of power every eight years, which under the constitution he would have to do as president).

But Medvedev has clearly seen the error of his ways. Perhaps he's still working himself into the role, and will yet emerge as the type of naturally tough leader that Russians have come to expect.

If his heart fails again, however, he clearly will be one-term Dima, another loser from the 2008 war in Georgia.

After Georgia, A Day of Reckoning For Washington

Russia says it will start withdrawing its troops from Georgia tomorrow. If that truly happens -- and there are contrary signs -- a new, probably far more important stage of the Georgian crisis will begin. That's the assessment of the affair by the arc of countries -- from Europe, swinging south and east to the edge of western China -- that are directly affected by what Russia does.

How these countries perceive the U.S. response to the war in Georgia will determine whether Russia has effectively crippled a hard-fought, 15-year-old American effort to inject itself as a power in Russia's backyard.

So far, much ink has been spilled over whether the U.S. and Russia are in a new Cold War. In Washington, we hear that the era of a post-Soviet U.S.-Russia alliance is over. The Kremlin counters that the West is intent on provoking it, and thwarting its natural rights as a great power.

The truth is that Moscow's presumptions are essentially correct -- the U.S. has conducted a definitively anti-Moscow policy on Russia's western and southern rims, one dressed up as reformist- and energy-minded, but nonetheless centrally designed to contain Russia within its borders.

But this policy well-suits American security aims, and those of the West as a whole. Conceived in the Clinton administration, it foresaw this very day, when then-forlorn Russia would regain its feet and possibly threaten the independence of its traditional colonial backyard.

One thing to keep in mind is that Russian disgruntlement with Georgia didn't originate with NATO expansion, Kosovo independence, Russia's resurgent petro-power, or Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's alleged jokes about Vladimir Putin's height.

Russia's first military attack on Georgia was not ten days ago but in 1993, when Moscow backed Abkhazia in its military separation from Georgia. In the subsequent years, then-Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze was twice nearly assassinated, attacks that, in interviews with me and others, he blamed on Russia and his insistence on Georgia becoming the strategic transit route for the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.

In other words, there's strong reason to believe that nothing Saakashvili did, short of capitulation to Russian domination of Georgia, would have satisfied Moscow. Friends tell me that Shevardnadze finally found an accommodation with Russia. If so, it was an accommodation that included the threat of assassination if he went too far.

Georgia wasn't the rationale behind American policy. But the Caspian Sea policy, conceived, as O and G readers know, by a today-forgotten National Security Council officer named Sheila Heslin, did attempt to get Russia accustomed to living within its own borders, and not threatening its neighbors.

The policy was dual. It involved a continuation of the expansion of NATO initiated by President George H.W. Bush, in order to prevent a future, resurgent Russia from gobbling up pieces of the former Soviet bloc in eastern and central Europe. And, on the Caspian, to the south of Russia, the U.S. promoted the construction of energy pipelines to link the Caucasus and Central Asia to the West, and provide them the financial wherewithal to withstand any Russian economic pressure. As a transit point for three of the new pipelines, otherwise-isolated Georgia, situated right on Russia's border, became a U.S. strategic partner.

After 9/11, the Bush administration -- carrying the policy further -- established military bases in Central Asia for the assault on Afghanistan, and then left them in place after the Taliban were dispersed.

The policy made sense considering U.S. interests. The West had a stake in making sure that Russia did not again become a threatening power; by encouraging Russia not to expand back into its former Soviet lands, it might express its nationhood in other ways, such as in business. (For those who see all policy as oil-generated, remember that there was no oil shortage in the 1990s; oil was much-discussed, but it was an instrument of policy -- how to give the Caucasus and Central Asia some breathing room from Russia -- rather than the rationale for it.)

Many of the eight presidents of the region embraced the U.S. agenda. At once, there was a lever against centuries-old Russian dominance.

But ten days ago, Russia put that declaration to the test. With its assault on Georgia, it seemed to expose the U.S. policy as a superpower vanity.

And it seemed true that Washington was caught off-guard. It seemed either to have forgotten the rationale behind its Caspian Sea policy, or, more probable, to have staked its policy on the hope that by now Russia had changed, and would not rotely use its military in the face of a perceived challenge.

Whichever the case, Russia's invasion of Georgia threatens the very real gains of these 15 years. If Russia is seen to have come out ahead, the U.S. may retain its influence in Europe, where Moscow could even suffer a backlash -- Europe could decide after all to build new pipelines to diversify away from Russian natural gas. But America's carefully built role as a great power in Russia's south would be in jeopardy.

The Central Asian and Caucasus leaders are watching.

I myself wonder now whether it matters if Russia in fact does withdraw all the way into Abkhazia and South Ossetia (which I doubt. I think Russia will maintain at least some troops outside the territories. It seems improbable that Russia will entirely give up the ground it gained within Georgia proper.).

Russia has demonstrated that it can and might cross borders of its former Soviet colonies when it sees fit. In Russia's view, these are not international borders; they are Georgia, they are Kazakhstan, they are Azerbaijan -- not real independent states, but former Russian territories.

Ultimately, Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev and Turkmenistan's Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov -- the stewards of the region's great energy wealth -- understand the language of power.

They understood when a parade of American officials visited and argued that it was wise to cultivate a relationship with the most powerful nation on Earth.

The trouble is that, these days, it's not clear any longer that the U.S. is very powerful in its declared zones of strategic interest.

Arranged Marriage

The next worse thing to a politician deciding for you that he's going to be your leader is your neighbor deciding who is going to be your leader.

That's the situation in Georgia, and why I think, unlike some other commentators, that Russia won't likely succeed -- now that the actual shooting has been halted -- in ousting President Mikheil Saakashvili.

Across the former Soviet Union, ordinary people don't decide who is president. Cabals of powerful people -- regional strongmen, spy agencies, billionaire businessmen, old Soviet apparachiks -- decide among themselves. They say, "Hey Dima, you be president. It's good for the gang." When the voters go to the polls, Dima magically receives 88%.

That method of selection would include Vladimir Putin, his successor Dmitri Medvedev, plus almost all the presidents of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The exception is Ukraine and the Baltics, which have reasonably authentic elections, and do kick out the rascals when so moved.

Lots of times the majority of voters actually favor the winner, but that's besides the point.

The leaders of the two breakaway regions of Georgia that are currently in the news are in power specifically because they are favored by Moscow. In other words, at home in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it's no shame to be a stooge of Moscow. It's the same in Chechnya, as we've
discussed previously on O and G -- President Ramzan Kadyrov is a delighted instrument of Russian power.

Putin tried to choose Ukraine's leader, but it backfired, which is how Viktor Yushchenko was elected. It's similar in Georgia. The contempt of the Kremlin toward Georgians is equalled by the Georgians toward the Kremlin.

So that, even if Saakashvili is despised by some other Georgian politicians, none would get anywhere near Russia. It would be the kiss of political death.

If Saakaskvili is removed prematurely, for whatever reason -- which as I say I do not expect -- look for the rise of an equally nationalist Georgian leader, perhaps quieter, less egotistical, but still anti-Russian.

Those are Georgian politics.

Georgia, Russia and Rethinking China

Years after his humiliating knockout by Muhammad Ali, the boxer George Foreman returned to the ring to a string of triumphs and the world championship despite being in his 40s. It was more marketing than sport. When asked about his choice of opponents, Foreman famously remarked that he didn't fight anyone his mama couldn't whup.

That's one way of looking at Russia's effective annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia over the last 24 hours. With apologies to my Georgian friends, Georgia simply isn't a serious military actor; with the exception of the Chechens and Armenians, none of the Caucasus peoples is (which is why the Abkhazians and Ossetians are relying on Russia to fight their battles).

Where Foreman was smart is that he never got back in the ring with Ali. Fifteen years after its near dismemberment by Russian-backed forces, however, Georgia wasn't so wise. It doesn't mean a return to 1993, which ushered in a literally dark decade, when Georgia often lacked even electricity to light itself. But Russia's military demonstration does show that Georgia isn't an independent actor at the moment.

Vladimir Putin (for it's clear now who is truly in charge in Moscow) has also shown that Russia doesn't intend for Georgia to join NATO. And NATO has shown that it doesn't have the gumption or inclination to stand up to Russia.

The question for the U.S. and the West as a whole is fundamental, and goes back to the original objective of the Western energy corridor: As O and G readers know, Washington's rationale was not sending a million barrels of oil a day to the West, but turning the Russian-dominated Caucasus and Central Asia into a financially independent, pro-Western region.

Georgia is a key component of the strategy, as a crossover point for the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, its companion natural gas line, and the smaller Baku-Supsa Early Oil line.

Georgian absorption into NATO is effectively off the table. But does that mean an end to the West's challenge to Russia's regional energy power?

The short answer is no -- all these lines will continue to operate. Russia won't interfere with them. Why? Because its larger economic-political strategy in Europe depends on not spooking the Europeans, who could then be encouraged to back the construction of more non-Russian energy pipelines to Europe, and thus dilute Russian power there.

(I just received reliable confirmation that, contrary to a statement by Georgia, Russia did not bomb near the Baku-Ceyhan line. Bombs were dropped near the smaller Baku-Supsa line, which leads to Georgia's Black Sea, but caused no damage. The Supsa line passes near South Ossetia so it's possible that this was a fog of war situation.)

So Russia will let the Baku lines be. But it seems to me that an expansion -- the proposed trans-Caspian oil and natural gas lines, and the proposed Nabucco line to Europe -- are now effectively dead. No Caspian president would gamble his survival by embracing such a project, and that's precisely how they would calibrate such a decision.

The West simply has too few levers with Russia.

But there is one, and it's China. Since the goal of U.S. policy is energy independence for the Caucasus and Central Asian states, why does the oil and natural gas have to go West?

China is building oil and natural gas lines from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to Xinjiang and beyond. Washington has already quietly gotten behind these efforts, but it might be the wisest course to turn up the volume by offering actually to help to build such lines.

The next U.S. president would have make such a shift part of a larger, well-considered China strategy. Russia would hate such a U.S.-China energy tandem, but that is what leverage in this region is all about.

Huffing and Puffing in Georgia

With so much hyperbole flowing in the conflict in Georgia -- on numbers of casualties, on the aims of the opposing sides -- where should one focus one's attention?

I remain tuned to Georgia proper, and not South Ossetia itself, or even the town of Gori to the south that has been bombed by Russian jets.

Specifically, Georgia claims that Russian naval carriers are in position off Georgia's Black Sea coast, and are readying to offload troops. If accurate -- I've seen no confirmation -- and these troops do occupy ground in Georgia itself, and not simply within the pro-Moscow separatist enclave of Abkhazia, this will be a different war. This would be Russia declaring who is in charge, a message that would be intended not just for Georgia, but for the West, which has been considering absorbing Georgia into NATO.

It would be the same were the scores of Russian troop carriers reported to have poured into South Ossetia to cross into Georgia proper.

A far more remote possibility would be Russian bombing of the trans-Georgian oil or natural gas pipelines. Georgia claims that Russia has already targeted -- but missed hitting -- the 1,000-mile Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, but I doubt the account. Such an attack would be regarded in the West as a direct assault on Western interests.

As long as the conflict remains in and around South Ossetia, the fighting can be seen as a bloody uptick in the Caucasus version of huffing and puffing. But it is containable.