Thursday 3 March 2011

Moscow turns its military gaze east

New world order has Russia considering China as the enemy, writes Thomas Grove

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Guanyu said...

Moscow turns its military gaze east

New world order has Russia considering China as the enemy, writes Thomas Grove

Thomas Grove, Reuters
03 March 2011

Russia is directing its warships and missiles east, flexing its muscles in a bid to defend its position as an Asian power against China’s growing might. The rise of China has forced Russia’s leaders to turn their gaze eastward and reassess decades of Soviet-era planning for a land war on the European plain or the nightmare of a nuclear conflict with the United States.

With Russia the world’s largest energy producer, and China its largest energy consumer, they would appear the ideal match. But the speed at which China’s military is growing presses the question: how can Moscow feed the Chinese dragon with oil and gas but still manoeuvre to deal with its increasing power?

In response, Russia reasserts its right to muscle back into the Far East, which is riddled with territorial conflicts and eyed by the world’s top two military spenders - the United States and China.

“Russia is still an Asia-Pacific power,” said Pavel Baev of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. “Moscow’s plans are definitely a signal to China that Russia takes this area seriously.”

Russia’s paramount leader, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, has promised more than US$651 billion in defence spending over the next decade.

The country spent US$61 billion last year.

Core military spending by the United States was US$530 billion last year, while China, the world’s second largest military spender, said it poured nearly US$78 billion into arms in 2010, although some analysts believe that figure may be higher.

Among the first of the Russian military hardware to head eastwards will be two Mistral helicopter carriers that Moscow agreed to buy from France late last year. They are expected to be handed over to Russia in late 2013.

A unit of the Russian S-400 air-defence missile system, able to counter missiles and aircraft, will also be stationed in the Far East.

Deputy Defence Minister Nikolai Pankov said in a radio interview last month that the military was giving its Far East forces “top-priority attention”.

A new nuclear arms limitation treaty between Russia and the United States has reinforced statements on both sides that war between Moscow and the West is unthinkable, giving the Kremlin room to send more resources east.

President Dmitry Medvedev vowed last month to deploy weapons on a group of small islands at the centre of a territorial row with Japan. Medvedev visited the Kuril Islands in November, followed by top officials including Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.
By emphasising its claim on the islands, which Soviet forces occupied at the end of the Second World War, Russia found a reason to boost its weaponry in the East.

For its part, Japan deemed Medvedev’s visit to the Kurils as “regrettable” and summoned the Russian ambassador to explain.

The reaction prompted another bout of Russian posturing, in which Japan’s response was labelled unacceptable.

But some see all this talk focused on Japan as a bluff, designed to distract from the real reason for the new focus eastwards.

Baev said: “I think that spot was chosen not at random, but as a place where Russia can take a stance without taking any major risks.” Namely, upsetting China, now Russia’s largest trade partner with some US$9.5 billion in bilateral trade.

Russia took over large swathes of resource-rich eastern Siberia from China through a combination of negotiation and military force in the mid-19th century.

Guanyu said...

Much of Moscow’s policy toward China has been formed around fears that Beijing wants that thinly populated land back - either as room for its burgeoning population or to exploit for the minerals, oil and gas it holds.

In 2008, Moscow ceded 174 square kilometres of land to Beijing on their shared border along the Ussuri and Amur Rivers. Nearly four decades earlier, in 1969, it was the scene of an exchange of fire between the two powers that left nearly 60 dead. “They’re still worried that China will invade Siberia one day because of the resources,” Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior analyst at military and public-sector think tank CNA, said in an interview last month.

“Because, from the Russian point of view, it’s a very sparsely populated area, hard to defend, very remote from the centre of Russia,” he said.

Beijing’s claims on a series of uninhabited islets - that Japan also considers its own - is also a cause for alarm for its neighbours.

Moscow is by no means looking for a fight with Beijing, but some analysts say it wants to make sure China’s territorial claims do not upset the delicate balance of power in the Far East.

Its naval plans aim to keep it the world’s top oil producer by protecting large offshore oil and gas holdings on the island of Sakhalin, northeast of China, where a production-sharing agreement with Exxon Mobil will help make up for an expected oil shortfall in west Siberia.

While Russia and China commissioned the Chinese arm of the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline this year, which is scheduled to send 300,000 barrels of crude a day to China for 20 years, military dealings between the two are levelling off.

China has been a big buyer of Russian arms, but its orders will be at best flat this year. This is in part due to its own defence industry, which analysts say owes some of its success to copying Russian technology.

They point to China’s own fifth-generation fighter plane, which Beijing unveiled during US Defence Secretary Dr Robert Gates’s recent visit to China, as little more than a tweaked version of a Russian design.