Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1584

August 15:

Reuters reports that the Russian armed forces’ deputy chief of staff, Col.-Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, has said that Poland risks becoming the target of a Russian military strike for signing a deal with the United States to accept a missile interceptor base as part of an ABM system aimed at countering attacks from rogue states. “The USA is engaged in an anti-missile defense for its own government, and not for Poland,” Interfax quoted Nogovitsyn as saying. “And Poland, in deploying (elements of the system) opens itself to a military strike. That is 100 percent.” Nogovitsyn said Russia’s national security doctrine allows nuclear weapons to be used “against governments that have nuclear weapons” and “against allies of countries with nuclear weapons, if they somehow enable them.”

President Dmitry Medvedev has said that the missile defense system which the U.S. plans to deploy in Eastern Europe “has the Russian Federation as its target,” NEWSru.com reports. Speaking at a joint news conference in Sochi with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Medvedev characterized as a “lie” the U.S. insistence that the ten missile interceptors to be deployed in Poland are aimed against missile attacks from rogue nations.

Medvedev also told reporters in Sochi that Georgia’s leadership bears full responsibility for “aggression in relation to peacekeepers and the civilian population of South Ossetia,” which he further described as “unlawful, brutal deeds.” Medvedev added, according to the Kremlin’s website: “If someone continues to [attack] our citizens, our peacekeepers, then of course we will respond just the same way we have responded. There should be no doubt about this.” Merkel, for her part, said that Russia’s military offensive against Georgia was “disproportionate.”

Commenting on Russia’s military offensive against Georgia, President George W. Bush has said that “bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century,” the Voice of America reports. “Only Russia can decide whether it will now put itself back on the path of responsible nations, or continue to pursue a policy that promises only confrontation and isolation,” he said.


August 16:

Russian troops are reportedly dug in around the Georgian town of Gori just hours after President Dmitry Medvedev signed a European Union-brokered peace plan to end the conflict. According to Bloomberg News correspondents, Russian troops withdrew their checkpoints to positions about half a kilometer behind the town of Kaspi, located between Gori, which connects Georgia’s east and west, and the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. President Mikheil Saakashvili said on August 15th that Kaspi is one of three Georgian towns that Russians moved into after the ceasefire. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who visited Georgia, said that if the Russians haven’t begun to pull back, they “are perhaps already not honoring their word.”

Meanwhile, the International Herald Tribune reports that as Rice was speaking in Tbilisi, a Russian column of at least a dozen armored vehicles advanced to roughly 40 kilometers from the Georgian capital, by far the Russians’ closest approach to the city.


August 17:

Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has said that $7 billion of capital flowed out of Russia during the conflict with Georgia, Interfax reports. Kudrin predicted that the net capital inflow for 2008 will be lower than the $30 billion-$40 billion predicted by Russia’s Central Bank – a result, he said, of the world financial crisis and recent “political risks” that have influenced foreigners’ decisions about putting money into or taking money out of Russia. According to NEWSru.com, Kudrin also predicted that Russia’s oil and gas revenues will reduce threefold by 2023, mainly because of old fields going out of production “en masse.”