But I suppose Donald Trump is a bigger issue than war with Russia or deterioriating relations between the US and Russia. Between Iran and US. Between the US and ... practically everyone.
October 10, 2016 — 7:19 AM PDT Updated
on October 11, 2016 — 8:15 AM PDT
Russian state television is back on
a war footing.
This time, the ramped-up rhetoric
follows the collapse of cease-fire efforts in Syria. As the U.S. and Russia
accused each other of sinking diplomacy, Moscow increased its military presence
in the Mediterranean and Baltic regions, and suspended a nuclear
non-proliferation treaty. A prime-time news program warned that the U.S. wants
to provoke a conflict.
The sudden escalation puts the
relationship back into the deep freeze it was in at the peak of the crisis over
Ukraine in 2014, which also sparked a wave of hostility in state media. That
anti-U.S. campaign ended as the Kremlin sought to ease Western punitive
measures imposed over the Ukrainian crisis -- hopes that now seem to be in
tatters.
“Offensive behavior toward Russia
has a nuclear dimension,” Russian state TV presenter Dmitry Kiselyov said in
his “Vesti Nedelyi” program on Sunday. “Moscow would react with nerves of iron
to a Plan B,” he said, referring to any possible U.S. military strike in Syria.
The Kremlin’s control over Russian
media has in part helped keep President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating
above 80 percent during the country’s longest recession in two decades and
portrayed military deployments in Crimea and Syria as victories against western
encroachment.
Sanction
Threat
The rise in tensions could lead to
new sanctions against the Kremlin, which some members of German Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s party have sought to penalize over Syria. It risks blowing off
course efforts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, which provoked the worst
standoff since the Cold War after Putin annexed Crimea and backed pro-Russian
rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Following the collapse of months of
diplomacy, Russia is pursuing an air campaign in Syria to bolster its ally,
President Bashar al-Assad, against U.S.-backed rebels and establishing
permanent bases there. The Obama administration suggested that Russian actions
in Syria could amount to war crimes and blamed Russia for cyber attacks aimed at disrupting the U.S.
election.
The result will be the “ossification
of U.S.-Russian relations at an abysmally low level,” said Cliff Kupchan,
chairman of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based risk consultancy. “Deep
mistrust of Putin will now be structural and unanimous among U.S. policy
makers.”
Hollande,
Merkel
In a signal of the renewed rupture,
Putin canceled a planned trip to France next week after his French
counterpart Francois Hollande refused to appear alongside him at a
ceremony to inaugurate a Russian religious center in Paris. Hollande said he
was only willing to meet Putin to discuss Syria amid French calls for a halt to
the bombing of the city of Aleppo, where a quarter of a million civilians are
trapped. “It will be to Russia’s shame if there isn’t a stop to the killings in
Aleppo,” Hollande said.
There is a possibility that Putin
will meet the leaders of Germany, France and Ukraine in Berlin the same day as
the planned French trip for “Normandy format” talks, Kremlin foreign-policy
aide Yuri Ushakov suggested Monday in Istanbul. These talks are aimed at
solving the military conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Russia supports
separatists fighting the government.
Bombs,
Missiles
Over the past week, Russia stepped
up its confrontation with the U.S. over its bombing in Aleppo, where it says it
is fighting terrorists. Russia on Oct. 8 vetoed a French-proposed United
Nations Security Council resolution demanding an end to air attacks on the
northern city.
Russia deployed the S-300
anti-aircraft missile system to Syria and reinforced its presence by sending
three missile ships to the Mediterranean. It confirmed Western media reports
it’s stationed Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad exclave sandwiched between
NATO members Poland and Lithuania. Poland’s defense minister said the action
caused the “highest concern.”
“The world has got to a dangerous
phase,” former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview with state
news service RIA Novosti on Monday.
‘Dangerous
Games’
Both the Iskander and the Kaliber
missiles carried by these ships can be fitted with nuclear warheads, Kiselyov
said in his program. The presenter is known for making provocative statements
critical of the U.S. He bragged in 2014 that Russia is the only country capable
of turning the U.S. to radioactive dust.
After a strike by the U.S.-led
coalition on a Syrian army base last month that the Pentagon said was a mistake
killed dozens of soldiers, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it won’t allow a
repetition. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an interview with state-run
Channel One broadcast Sunday said Russian defenses can protect the Syrian army
from any U.S. attack and warned the American military to desist from “dangerous
games.”
Alexei Pushkov, a senator who headed
the lower house of parliament’s foreign affairs committee until recently, in a
Twitter post raised the specter of a confrontation like the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis, which brought the U.S. and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.
Russia won’t back down, said
Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house
of parliament. The risk of military clashes between the U.S.-led coalition and
Russian military in Syria “is rising every day,” he said.
For Putin, the only strategy is to
raise the bet, said Eurasia’s Kupchan. “He’s masterfully playing a weak hand to
the detriment of U.S. security and economic interests,” he said.
(A previous version of this story
was corrected to fix the Eurasia Group chairman’s first name.)
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