MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Vladimir Simonov.)
Washington has officially announced its readiness to join the talks on the settlement of the long and slowly developing Transdnestr conflict. The self-proclaimed republic is trying to protect its independence from the encroachments of Moldova.
The U.S. State Department has also expressed a desire to become a major player on another "field of contention" in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) - South Ossetia. This enclave is trying to gain independence from Georgia, especially after the bloody clashes of the early 1990s, when both sides lost thousands of lives.
To make a long story short, the United States is energetically moving into the trouble spots of the post-Soviet territories where Russia had been the main intermediary and peacekeeper.
Indicatively, these Washington initiatives were made public after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent unsuccessful tour of Central Asia. Rice failed to convince Uzbekistan to keep the U.S. base in Khanabad, initially deployed for the anti-Taliban operation in Afghanistan. Offended by the U.S. conclusion that the May 13 violence in Andijan was staged not by Islamic radicals but by democrats, Uzbek President Islam Karimov ordered the Americans out within six months.
Many Central Asian states, including Uzbekistan, started questioning America's intentions after the "color revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine, which were mostly funded by American sources.
It was probably this falling temperature in relations with some post-Soviet states that forced Washington to offer its good services in the settlement of the so-called frozen conflicts to those CIS countries which still have a warm feeling for the U.S. Moldovan leaders have long been trying to involve Americans and Europeans in the Transdnestr settlement. And Mikhail Saakashvili's relations with Moscow have worsened to such an extent that he ordered Russian peacekeepers to leave by July 15, 2006.
The nervous reaction of American diplomats to cooling relations with some CIS states and the radicalism of Chisinau and Tbilisi, which are using Russophobia to camouflage their own failures to improve the people's life, produced this new element of local peacekeeping - American involvement.
On the other hand, this conclusion may be a leftover from "the conspiracy theories" of the initial stage of a Russia-U.S. rivalry in the post-Soviet territories. At that time, the rules of the game were not clear, Moscow suspected Washington of trying to push it out of the zone of its historical interests, and Washington suspected Russia of an incurable nostalgia for the Soviet empire.
The two countries are gradually shedding mutual phobias. Moscow has suggested - at different levels, from President Vladimir Putin to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov - something radically different. It called for turning the post-Soviet territories into an area of mutual respect and predictable partnership of Russia and the West, who should join hands to help the CIS states promote democracy and economy.
The settlement of "frozen conflicts," though an element of partnership, has a number of specific features. The first and biggest of them is that Russia's leading peacekeeping role in the CIS is not rooted in imperialist aspirations but is the logical continuation of recent history. Russia paid in human lives to stop the conflicts in Transdnestr, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It was guided, among other things, also by the security interests of the numerous Russian-speaking communities in the conflict zones.
So, the attempts to describe Russian peacekeeping efforts as "unwanted," like radicals in Tbilisi and Chisinau are doing, contradict history and demographic realities. While offering its mediation, the U.S. should know that no long-term agreement on Transdnestr, Abkhazia and South Ossetia is possible without full-scale involvement of Russia as part of international efforts.
In fact, Russia and the U.S. have a positive experience of mutual peacekeeping. Russia, the U.S. and France are co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group on the settlement in Nagorny Karabakh. This conflict is a time bomb that can explode in the South Caucasus and is threatening both Russian and American interests.
As for the conflicts in Georgia and Moldova, Russian experts firmly believe that Russia should share responsibilities for the maintenance of stability there with the West - the European Union and the U.S. "Moscow is ready to discuss relevant proposals, both political and material," Vladimir Chizhov, the new Russian Ambassador to the EU, said recently.
However, Russia warns that each conflict in the post-Soviet territories has a specific institutional format: the Minsk Group for Nagorny Karabakh, the five-member group of Moldova, Transdnestr, Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE for Transdniester, UN structures in Abkhazia, and so on. These forms of mediation took long to develop and suit all sides.
Russia is not against the U.S. or the EU contributing new energy to peacekeeping efforts in the CIS conflict zones. But it believes that undermining the established formats would be inadmissible.
Russia and the West would not benefit from a secret struggle for spheres of influence. They would do best to discuss as partners all the CIS problems, including the frozen conflicts.
