Russian Disinformation Alienates the West from Russian Periphery

Published by the Atlantic Council on July 20, 2015, and featured in Newsweek as “How Putin Keeps His Neighbors On Edge,”  and in the Orange County Register as "Chapman's James Coyle: How Putin spins events, issues to keep Russia's independent neighbors in line"on September 13, 2015. To access the original article, click here.

The Russian Army has released a photo of a Ukrainian tank decorated with a swastika, yet the original Reuters photograph shows no such emblem. Russia also released a photo of a Ukrainian soldier covered in Nazi tattoos, but that picture was actually taken in 2005, inside a Russian prison. Europe is revolted by any reminders of its Nazi past, which is why Russia plays up false claims that Kyiv is a product of that tradition. At a time when Ukraine and other former Soviet republics need worldwide support, Russia continues its media barrage to alienate these countries from their natural allies in the West.

The stakes are enormous. In 1997, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski identified Azerbaijan, Iran, South Korea, Turkey, and Ukraine as "critically important geopolitical pivots" in The Grand Chessboard. Without Ukraine, he writes, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Similarly important is Azerbaijan, which Brzezinski calls the cork in the bottle containing the riches of the Caspian Sea Basin and Central Asia.

Russia continues a strategy of keeping its former republics separate and reliant on Moscow. It opposed construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline until a Russian company was included in the consortium. When Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey announced their willingness to build the Nabucco natural gas pipeline, Russia retaliated by promoting the rival South Stream pipeline. As Ukraine pulls further away from the Russian orbit, Moscow supports the creation of Turkish Stream to bypass Ukraine as a transit state. When Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan announced their intention to build a Trans-Caspian pipeline, Moscow raised environmental concerns—while ignoring similar environmental issues surrounding Russian platforms in the northern Caspian.

There are differences in how Moscow uses its information operations in the various countries. According to the Monterey Institute's Ruben Gzirian, "Russia targets political and business elites, whereas it targets ethnic Russians among the general populations of Ukraine, Moldova, and the Baltics." Such targeting furthers the Putin doctrine justifying Russian intervention to protect Russian-speakers, no matter where they are. As an example, in May 2014 Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin played up to sympathizers in Transnistria and Ukraine when he tweeted future plans to visit the area on board a TU-160—Russia's largest strategic bomber.

But Russian disinformation isn't the only thing that alienates the Russian periphery from the West. A recent spate of press reports has detailed Azerbaijan's detention of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter Khadija Ismayilova. Reports on Azerbaijan's dire human rights situation often give short shrift to the country's rapid economic transformation. According to the World Bank, about half of all Azeris lived in poverty in the early 2000s; by 2013, that ratio had fallen to 5 percent. This remarkable feat took place while roughly 600,000 people—about 7 percent of the population—remain displaced because of Armenia's occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions.

While Western human rights organizations focus negative attention on Azerbaijan, Russia has been offering an olive branch. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently criticized Russian TV for not sufficiently covering the 2015 European Games in Baku. Putin attended the games himself, and used the occasion to meet with President Ilham Aliyev. The timing was no coincidence.

Ukraine and Azerbaijan have a lot in common with Moscow: many Russian speakers, a shared past in the former Soviet Union, and transportation and communication links through the old imperial center. What keeps these countries out of the Russian orbit is their desire for sovereignty. Russia or its allies already control large swaths of territory in both those states. Those occupied lands house the Russian Black Sea Naval Fleet, and justify a major Russian Air Force base in Armenia. The United States and the European Union must give the independence of Ukraine and Azerbaijan the highest priority. If Russia manages to convince the West to avoid former Soviet states as illiberal entities, the only winner on the global chessboard will be Putin.

In February, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told US Secretary of State John Kerry that Russian actions are an affront to Ukrainian sovereignty, and that he appreciates US support of Ukrainian independence. Meanwhile, Aliyev emphasizes the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan, a country former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a strategic partner of the United States.

Indeed, partnerships are there for the taking. The real questions are whether Kyiv can maintain its country's unity and pro-Western orientation, and if Azerbaijan will partner with the West—or the Kremlin—or try to dance with both.

James J. Coyle is a Research Fellow at the Atlantic Council and the Director of Global Education at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Blinders in Benghazi

James J. Coyle: Blinders in Benghazi

Following the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, senators have tried to find out who was responsible. Hillary Clinton, the outgoing U.S. secretary of state responded, with some heat, “What difference does it make?”

A report last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee answered that question: between 1998 and 2012, there were 273 significant attacks against U.S. diplomatic facilities and personnel. It is therefore essential that our representatives abroad be protected if America’s interests are to be advanced.
What the intelligence committee found, although they did not put it in these words, is an echo of the findings of the 9/11 Commission: the attack could have been avoided and the principle reason why it was not was a failure of imagination. No one believed that an attack using commercial airplanes against New York City was possible, even though there were indications something similar was being planned; similarly in Benghazi, despite indications that our diplomatic personnel were in great danger, no one took steps to protect them. No one seriously anticipated such an attack.
A harsh judgment? The Senate found that in the months preceding the attack there were hundreds of analytic reports providing strategic warnings that militias intended to strike U.S. facilities in Libya. There were ten militia training camps surrounding Benghazi alone and some of them were training to attack Americans.
Despite the warning and 20 specific incidets against the compound or other international organizations in the area, the compound had to rely on a local militia for security, the 17 February Martyrs Brigade. Yet, when “the security team asked 17th February members to ‘provide cover’ for them … members refused, saying they preferred to negotiate with the attackers instead,” according to a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report.
Clearly, when the host government cannot provide security for our diplomatic compounds, the United States needs to rely on its own military, not on a “rent-a-mob” recruited from the back alleys of a third world city.
Ambassador Stevens recommended on June 6 that some sort of security team be established in Benghazi, a recommendation that was not acted upon. On July 9, he asked for the temporary assignment of additional security personnel. “The State Department never fulfilled this requested and … never responded to the request with a cable.” On Aug. 15, the Regional Security Officer expressed concern about the ability to defend the post, citing limitations in manpower, security measures, weapons, and support from the Libyan government. The State Department took no action to meet these concerns.
Even Ambassador Stevens seems to have erred. When AFRICOM head General Carter Ham read the results of the Aug. 15 review, he offered to extend the deployment of 16 special operations personnel assigned to the embassy, a DOD site security team. State Department had not requested the extension, and Ambassador Stevens declined General Ham’s offer less than a month before the fatal attack.
Until the United States government begins to imagine that the worse can happen and is willing to act on the warnings it received, there will be more disasters in the future. One can only hope there will not be another report outlining the government’s lack of imagination.
James J. Coyle, Ph.D., is director of Global Education at Chapman University and the chair of the Eurasian Members Committee of the Pacific Council on International Policy.