• English Site
• >World
• >Russia
• >

  Russian Bear Roars: Why Is Moscow Risking a New Cold War?

Russian Bear Roars Why Is Moscow Risking a New Cold War?

By Christian Neef

Part 3: 'Our Leadership Has Ignored the Chinese Threat'

Spring came very late this year to Chebarkul, a small city on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. In May, when the ice had barely thawed in the area's many lakes, local farmers, following old custom, set fire to the grass in and along the margins of their fields. Thick clouds of smoke soon settled over the gray birch forests, which had not even leafed out yet, traveling as far as the provincial capital Chelyabinsk, 80 kilometers (50 miles) away.

Andrei Chabola also had the fields burned, if only for the sake of his tank -- to ensure that he would have a clear field of vision for target practice and would not set the grass on fire with his ammunition.

Chabola is 37, a colonel and already the deputy commander of the 34th Russian Motorized Rifle Division. He is a Russian through and through, tall, with a heavy, slightly ambling gait and a strong nose in a red-cheeked face. He is standing in the crow's nest of the control tower facing a tank training ground, the Chebarkul barracks behind him. A number of T-72 tanks are in the process of attempting to cross ditches and bridges at 45 kilometers per hour (28 mph).

"Comrade Colonel, tank obstacle overcome, no incidents, oil temperature normal," reports one of the drivers, stuttering in excitement. "Splendid," the commander graciously replies. The 295th Cossack Guards Regiment is in training.

The men driving these tanks are no longer conscripts. The Russian army has already begun training professional soldiers in Chebarkul, part of a growing career military that already numbers 100,000 nationwide. This number is the result of a compromise between the army leadership and the Kremlin, which has been calling for more effective armed forces since the bitter lessons of the war in Chechnya.

No one at this base makes a secret of his conviction that the decision made at the top is a big mistake. "Contract soldiers are in it for the money, not the fatherland," a colonel mumbles. He prefers not be identified by name. "Their only motivation is their lack of prospects. They come from the worst of families."

With two men from division headquarters in Yekaterinburg visiting the base, hardly anyone is willing to voice such criticism out loud. The military and the political establishment are already at odds. In Moscow, the general chief of staff was dismissed in early June because he considered the red-line policies of the civilian defense minister, a former furniture dealer, to be insane and dangerous. A tank training school has also been closed in Chelyabinsk, and the profession of officer "is worth nothing these days," says the colonel. But the Russian army's age-old problems still haven't been resolved. According to the colonel, the families of 122,000 officers have no fixed place of residence, and a lieutenant would "go to the dogs in Moscow" with the 12,000 rubles, or about €322 ($500), he is paid.

But when the talk turns to the West and greasy Ukrainian vodka begins flowing in the officers' mess, the men at the Chebarkul base express their opinions loudly and with one voice. "The Americans are building up their arsenals; they're surrounding us in Georgia and Ukraine," shouts Chabola, the deputy division commander. "They want to destroy us." And doesn't it sound "like a declaration of war," another officer asks, when Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, says publicly that the fact that Siberia, with its immense natural resources, belongs exclusively to Russia is one of the world's greatest injustices?

Although Albright repudiated the supposed quote long ago, the deeply humiliated Russian soul is unlikely to acknowledge her denials. But even the Russians know that the world, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, has become a different place. They know that the number of nuclear warheads a country possesses is no longer the deciding factor, that a surprise attack by NATO or a war between countries in Europe has become highly unlikely and that, for these reasons, simply counting tanks and howitzers hardly makes much sense anymore.

But what is the Russian military's mission, and for which potential conflicts must Russia be prepared? Even Colonel Chabola no longer believes that NATO is still the country's potential main adversary. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chabola served for two years in the eastern German town of Neustrelitz.

Moscow Obsessed with Its Arch-Rival

But then he was transferred to Blagoveshchensk, a city in the Amur region in the Russian Far East, directly on the Chinese border. "That's where more and more Chinese are buying their way into our territory," he says. "Siberia is big, and there are very few people who still live there today." To be exact, the population density on the Russian side of the border is two inhabitants per square kilometer, compared with 103 in the neighboring Chinese provinces.

The Chinese also came to Chebarkul last year, to take part in a maneuver called "Peace Mission 2007." In all, 1,400 soldiers and officers in the People's Army, as well as 300 airmen, had traveled 10,000 kilometers (6,211 miles) to this small Russian city in the Ural Mountains to spend nine days, together with Chabola's division, simulating the taking of a city occupied by "terrorists." The exercise was sponsored by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which was founded in 1996 to limit the American influence in Asia.

"The Chinese brought along their own combat technology, set up their own, separate tent city and videotaped everything, from every Russian tank to the soup pots in our canteen," says the colonel. "But whenever one of our men wanted to take a picture of them, their security people would step in right away."

This doesn't exactly sound like the friendship between the Soviet and Chinese people that both sides have insisted on in the past. Since border clashes erupted between China and the Soviet Union on the Ussuri River in 1969, Russian suspicions of Beijing have run deep. Chabola's officers are open about who they think Russia should truly fear: "the Chinese." One of the officers says that he read somewhere that Beijing has agreed not to pursue its territorial claims against Russia until 2015, "but what happens after that?"

These fears, as plainly as they are expressed by soldiers at this base, are merely worded somewhat more politely in the analyses of Moscow's political scientists. They write that the Kremlin and the military leadership still see the world through the prism of relations with the United States, and that Moscow is obsessed with a pathological desire for equality with its arch-rival and has no realistic understanding of future military dangers. According to the experts at the Institute for National Strategy, "the assumption that NATO is our main potential adversary seems rather doubtful today."

Russia should keep its eye on Beijing, says Stanislav Belkovsky, as he sits in the Akademiya Restaurant and broodingly stirs his cappuccino. According to Belkovsky, both China's propaganda and its military developments indicate that the country will expand primarily in the direction of Russia.

"What amazes us," says Belkovsky, the strategist who is so unpopular at home, "is that our leadership has simply ignored the Chinese threat until now."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan