Build on interests, if not on values

Editorial comment

Published: December 23 2004 02:00 Last updated: December 23 2004 02:00
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/348bb902-5487-11d9-8280-00000e2511c8.html

How Russia and the west react to Sunday's rerun presidential election in Ukraine - whichever way it goes - will set the tone for their wider relationship. Both Russia and the west should want at all costs to keep Ukraine together. Neither should want to exercise any exclusive sway over it. And each should want it to have good relations with the other.

These maxims will be harder for Russia, which has centuries-old links to Ukraine, to follow. But President Vladimir Putin now appears to be adjusting to the likelihood that his favoured candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, will lose the rerun to Viktor Yushchenko, whom the Russian leader said he would have no problem working with. After talks with Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der this week, Mr Putin made other conciliatory noises. He said he was ready to accept a dialogue with Germany and its European Union partners on Chechnya, and promised to speed up debt repayment to Germany and other creditor governments.

But the fact that the Russian president chooses to make these concessions to the German chancellor illustrates a hang-up that mars the Kremlin's general relations with the EU. For Russian leaders tend to be power snobs. As the world's biggest country, and nuclear-armed at that, they dislike the EU's post-modernism that stresses the equality of states. If they are to have a relationship with the EU, they want it to be a special one. Leaders of bigger EU states have generally been delighted to reciprocate Russia's cultivation of them.

Fortunately, Ukraine has been a wake-up call in Europe and in the US - where Mr Putin's anti-democratic moves and interference along Russia's borders had seemed to slip below the radar screen of an administration pre-occupied with the Middle East. For Mr Putin's use as an ally in Washington's war on terror is undermined if his policies destabilise Russia's neighbours. This should be especially obvious to Condoleezza Rice, who next month gets the chance to put her extensive academic study of Russia into practice as secretary of state.

The west cannot avoid engaging Russia, but for reasons that are also in Moscow's interest. Europe needs Russia's gas and oil but is so far Russia's only outlet for its pipelines. The west is helping Russia mop up its atomic waste and surplus nuclear weapons, but Russia does not want to be an environmental mess or a nuclear arms bazaar either. The Europeans need Russian support in their diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran going nuclear, but Moscow does not want another proliferator on its southern border.

If Mr Putin can see Russia's interest in co-operating with the west in these areas, he should also realise that the idea of an exclusive Russian sphere of influence no longer serves Moscow's interests, if it ever did. Both Russia and the west will benefit if Ukraine prospers through better relations with east and west.