Daily Times

Recent events suggest the Obama administration reckons that sanctioning Russia and expanding NATO’s militarisation in eastern Europe is not enough to deter Moscow’s belligerence towards nations comprising its “near abroad” (i.e. ex-Soviet republics) and former member states of the Warsaw Pact. To this effect, the Rio Olympics are Washington’s new geopolitical lever to force Russian President Vladimir Putin into cooling temperatures from the Black to the Baltic Sea. Or at the very minimum, push Moscow to posthaste halt its fighter jets from provocatively “buzzing” US warships before some trigger-happy marine starts World War III.

On July 21, the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland upheld a decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) banning Russian track and field athletes from participating in the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this year. This followed the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) bombshell announcement a few days earlier that Russia had by willful design covered up the positive drug tests of its athletes in the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014, and was furthermore running a state-backed doping programme.

The agency’s McLaren Report — named after the Canadian law professor heading the investigation — implicated Russia’s Ministry of Sport and its Federal Security Service (successor to the feared KGB) in subverting international anti-doping protocols. WADA had initiated the probe after Dr Grigor Rodchenko, director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory during the Sochi Olympics, turned whistleblower in a May interview with The New York Times, and revealed how the FSB had devised a way to open and reseal tamper-proof urine containers.

Putin, however, was not amused. Dismissing Rodchenko as “one man with a scandalous reputation,” he summoned his now trademark bombast to rip into both the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which had led calls to completely ban Team Russia from Rio. Bemoaning the “interference of politics in sport,” Putin accused Washington of making the Olympics “an instrument of geopolitical pressure.” He further contended the US had framed Russia, pointing to the USADA’s full-throated calls to censure Russian athletes even before the IOC had publicly commented on the McLaren Report. “Again,” Putin fumed, “one government is dictating its will to the whole international athletic community.”

Putin’s rant is not without merit. The USA Today reported on July 22 that a frenzy of stored samples retests following the McLaren Report failed a startling 98 athletes from at least eight different countries that took part in the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics. Why then punish only Russia for what is a worldwide epidemic? Especially when the games will be poorer without their second most decorated nation. The IOC concurred and backed down from a potential diplomatic row on July 24, ruling that Russia would not be handed a blanket ban. Instead, individual sports federations like IAAF were free to punish athletes found guilty of doping as they saw fit. The USADA quickly derided this decision, calling it a “confusing mess” and a “significant blow to the rights of clean athletes.”

Over two decades ago, as the Soviet Union crumbled in one fell swoop, negotiations for a new Europe between Washington and Moscow set the stage for future acrimony. At the heart of current Russo-American friction is NATO’s eastward expansion. Putin claims the West hoodwinked Russia in 1990 by assuring there would be no attempt to absorb former Soviet satellites into the alliance and later going back on its word. Though opinions differ on whether such a promise was ever made, there are many sources that validate Putin’s position.

In a detailed spread in November 2009, the respected German newspaper Der Spiegel, citing recorded conversations between Russian and West German officials, concluded “there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for former Soviet satellites like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.” Moreover, during the “2+4 Talks” in 1990, then US Secretary of State James Baker also guaranteed to Russian officials that the reunification of Germany would “not lead to the enlargement of NATO’s military organisation to the East.” While the weak, creaking Russia of the Boris Yeltsin years could not have sustained a grappling contest with America, times have changed and so has the “Great Bear.” NATO’s military adventurism in Eastern Europe particularly irks Russia. While the international community hailed US-led NATO airstrikes against Serbia in 1999 to arrest the genocide of Kosovar Muslims, Moscow condemned them as a blatant breach of international law and yet another example of American imperialism. Because the UN did not sanction these strikes, Russians across the social spectrum viewed “Operation Allied Force” as bullying of the ugliest kind. That NATO in 2008 unilaterally recognised the independent state of Kosovo made things worse for the Kremlin, smarting as it was from US transgressions into its traditional sphere of influence. Moreover, this year, NATO has upped the ante on confrontational moves designed to test Putin’s patience.

A sector of the continental Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) shield was recently deployed in Romania with another one planned for Poland. These will mesh with existing hardware in Turkey and on NATO warships patrolling the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas. To boot, 4,000 NATO (read mostly US) troops are set to reinforce forward bases in the Baltic states and Poland this year. Looking back, the one incident responsible for escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow in recent years would have to be NATO’s Bucharest summit in 2008, where the membership applications of the former Soviet states of Georgia and Ukraine were accepted in principle.

Putin, as payback, devised the annexation of Crimea as Moscow-backed separatists opened a new war theatre in the Donbass region of Ukraine. Russia had earlier fought a successful five-day war against Georgia in 2008 that resulted in the restive South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions declaring independence and gaining Russian recognition amid international outcry. Then, last October, taking advantage of US President Barack Obama’s indecisiveness in Syria, Putin ordered Russia’s military into the Middle East and immediately began reversing the territorial losses of his ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces continue to battle US-backed rebels and the Islamic State (IS) and Jabhat Al-Nusra militants.

After the customary sabre-rattling, Russia’s military success in Syria eventually forced Obama to dispatch US Secretary of State John Kerry to lobby Moscow for a coordinated plan to combat IS, much to the chagrin of his NATO partners. Of course, any truce arising from such an agreement will be compartmentalised at best. As Exhibit A, state-backed Russian hackers now stand accused of leaking emails that prove the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton colluded to thwart her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, from clinching the party’s nomination for president. It’s like the Cold War never ended.

The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance journalist