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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 40KB | 732 lines

<text> <title> The Armies of the Post-Soviet States </title> <article> <hdr> Current History, October 1992 The Armies of the Post-Soviet States </hdr> <body> By Mark Kramer--research fellow and deputy director of the European Security Project at Brown University's Center for Foreign Policy Development. One of the many oddities of life in the first days of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was the lingering presence of a military establishment whose chief mission had been to defend a regime and a country that no longer existed. As recently as the late 1980s, the Soviet military was a formidable institution. With some 5 million soldiers, it maintained a highly visible and intimidating presence in Europe, East Asia, and distant portions of the third world. Its alliance with six Eastern European countries in the Warsaw Pact not only provided a defensive "buffer zone" against the West, but also facilitated elaborate Soviet military plans for combined nuclear and conventional attacks against NATO. As backward as the Soviet Union may have been in most respects, the country had sufficient military strength to warrant being called a global "superpower." That status was abruptly lost, however, when first the Warsaw Pact collapsed and then the whole Soviet state disintegrated, giving way to 15 independent republics. The United States was left as the world's only superpower. And yet, even after the Soviet Union was dissolved, the Soviet military and the vast military-industrial complex that supported it remained in place, albeit at a somewhat reduced level. The failure of the CIS to develop into a viable institution raised further complications for the ex-Soviet armed forces. Despite initial attempts by the Russian government to preserve a joint military structure under the Commonwealth's auspices, the former republics moved swiftly to create their own armies. This trend soon compelled Russia to set up its own national armed forces, leaving the CIS with virtually no military or any other functions. The decline of the Commonwealth, in turn, has expanded Russia's direct control over many key aspects of post-Soviet military policy. The Rise of Independent Forces From the time the CIS was founded in December 1991, the 11 member-states (Georgia and the Baltic states did not join) agreed on only one important military issue: namely, that all nuclear and "strategic" forces should remain under unified central command. Matters pertaining to nonnuclear forces, and even some issues connected with nuclear weapons, were subject to dispute. Equally contentious were attempts to fund the central defense budget. The difficulty in resolving the status of the former Soviet armed forces stemmed from a fundamental tension between the two preponderant members of the Commonwealth--Russia and Ukraine--over what the CIS should be. Ukrainian leaders considered the Commonwealth a purely transitional organization whose chief purpose was to dispose of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal. Officials in Kiev often intimated that Ukraine would withdraw from the CIS as soon as the last of the Ukrainian-based nuclear weapons were eliminated. Russian leaders, however, hoped to make the Commonwealth a permanent (and ideally, Moscow-dominated) coordinating body that would oversee key economic, military, and political affairs. These divergent conceptions of the proper role for the CIS lay behind most of the specific disagreements about the former Soviet army. In the first few months of this year, the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian approaches was particularly evident on the question of forming separate national armed forces. As early as July 1990, when the Ukrainian parliament adopted a declaration of "sovereignty," Ukrainian leaders had insisted on the right to deploy an independent army as part of a larger drive to establish and maintain Ukraine's political independence. Even before Ukraine formally regained its independence in late 1991, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk had created a defense ministry under the leadership of General Konstantin Morozov, who promptly began organizing a full-fledged national army. In line with this effort, Kravchuk soon asserted Ukrainian jurisdiction over all nonnuclear forces based in Ukraine, and also laid claim to the Black Sea Fleet, based at Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula. In both cases Russia strongly objected to Ukraine's attempts to gain control. Equally controversial was Kravchuk's directive that all troops based on Ukrainian territory and sailors deployed with the Black Sea Fleet swear an oath of loyalty to Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands agreed to take the oath, but the requirement aroused vehement protests from Russian leaders and from some CIS military officers of Russian descent. In contrast to Ukraine's determination to form an independent military force, Russian President Boris Yeltsin tried for several months to avoid creating a separate Russian army. Instead, he sought to preserve the centralized command network and "common military-strategic space" of the CIS, and to head off attempts by other republics to set up their own armed forces. Yeltsin and his aides knew that any announcement about the establishment of a Russian army, even one nominally under CIS joint command, would undermine the Commonwealth's military viability. Initially, Yeltsin's desire to consolidate military forces under the CIS was widely shared within the Russian government, not least because Russian officials hoped the existence of the joint military command would thwart Ukraine's bid to set up an independent army. But as a Ukrainian army quickly became a reality, Russian leaders had to look anew at the option of forming their own military. This prospect gained greater urgency when Azerbaijan and Moldova followed Ukraine's lead in pressing ahead with independent armies and in eschewing most CIS joint military activities. Other former republics, such as Belarus and Uzbekistan, indicated that they also intended to create armed forces, though they were more willing than Ukraine to continue participating in the CIS command structure, at least temporarily. Pressure to form a separate Russian army also increased when successive meetings of the CIS heads of state in late 1991 and early 1992 failed to produce agreement on important military issues, including an acceptable command structure for "nonstrategic" weapons and a proper definition of "strategic" forces. The Russian government wanted as expansive a definition as possible, while Ukrainian leaders insisted that strategic forces be limited only to nuclear weapons and some aerospace defenses. The CIS leaders were also at odds over funding for Commonwealth military activities. Although they had agreed to share the financing of the CIS defense budget, most governments reneged on this commitment, and Russia effectively ended up providing all the funds. The movement toward a separate Russian army was also spurred by political infighting and disputes within the Russian government. On many issues, Yeltsin and his aides encountered criticism and outright opposition from more hard-line officials, particularly the vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, and the chairman of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov. By early 1992, both Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were publicly urging reconsideration of the question of the establishment of a Russian army. Although both men claimed to prefer "retaining the unity of the armed forces," they left no doubt that Russia should be prepared to organize its own military establishment. The mounting problems CIS units encountered in areas of ethnic conflict were an additional factor contributing to the Russian government's shift in favor of deploying a separate army. In Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova, soldiers under nominal CIS command were being drawn into local ethn