An Offer for Refusal

Richard Holbrooke, who was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Clinton administration, has an article in the Washington Post (free registration) about the upcoming May 9 "celebrations" in Moscow, and their implications for Russia's neighbours. An excerpt:

Valdas Adamkus has a problem. The 79-year-old president of Lithuania has been invited -- personally, persistently, even threateningly -- by Russian President Vladimir Putin to an event that he really, really doesn't think he should attend: the May 9 celebrations in Moscow marking the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Adolf Hitler. It's a real A-list affair: President Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, Silvio Berlusconi, the presidents of other former Soviet republics, and a cast of thousands.

But Adamkus does not view May 9, 1945, as a day of liberation for his tiny country and its Baltic neighbors. "On that day we traded Hitler for Stalin, and we should not celebrate it," he tells visitors. Most Lithuanians, proud of their central role in breaking up the Soviet Union in 1991, agree. But Putin seems almost desperate to have all the former Soviet republics honor Russia on May 9; he has even used his most potent threat, hinting that if Adamkus does not go, it could affect Russia's shipments of oil and gas.

Of course, as U.S. Ambassador to Lithuania Steve Mull has said, it does not matter to the United States whether Adamkus attends. What makes this more than a social problem is that it is symptomatic of a disturbing trend in Russian behavior toward the area where the Soviet Union once reigned supreme. And it poses to the Bush administration a dilemma far greater than the one Adamkus faces.

I am neither predicting nor advocating a return to the bad old Cold War days. Those are, thank God, gone forever. Russia, although much-diminished, is now an important and legitimate part of the international system. The new security architecture of Europe, worked out in the Clinton and Bush administrations with Boris Yeltsin and Putin, is no longer about containing Russia but about including it, and it has produced some historic achievements and cooperation.

But the continuation of those productive policies is endangered by events over the past year that the West can no longer ignore. Putin is rattled by the growing independence of some of the former Soviet republics, most notably Georgia and Ukraine. But his inept meddling, which failed to prevent democratic popular uprisings last year in both countries, has only weakened him.

As they say - read it all.

(via MAK)