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Russian warships causing no ripples in Pentagon
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-17 09:45 WASHINGTON – Russian warships have been plying the waters off Venezuela and Panama in recent weeks and are now heading for Cuba, but US officials are not so much wringing their hands as yawning.
Asked about a Russian warship transiting the Panama Canal earlier this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — who saw the ship while crossing the canal last week — said: "I guess they're on R&R. It's fine." The Pentagon, while puzzled by the Russians' actions, also is taking a ho-hum attitude. The US military commander for the region, Adm. James Stavridis, head of the US Southern Command, said that from his vantage point, there is no reason to be concerned about the Russian naval activity. "They pose no military threat to the US," Stavridis said in an e-mail to the AP on Tuesday.
There is no suggestion of a military confrontation, but the Russian moves are notable in part because they appear to reflect an effort by Moscow to flex some muscle in America's backyard in response to Washington's support for the former Soviet republic of Georgia and elsewhere on the Russian periphery. That includes US missile defense bases to be erected in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russians were unhappy with a US decision to send a state-of-the-art warship into the Black Sea as part of an American humanitarian aid mission for Georgia in the aftermath of last August's war with Russia. The Russians also are angry about the Bush administration's push to add Georgia and the former Soviet republic of Ukraine as members of the NATO military alliance. Under the gaze of the US Southern Command, Russian ships this fall held joint exercises with the navy of Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, is a fierce US critic. Navy Rear Adm. Tom Meek, the deputy director for security and intelligence at Southern Command, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that he sees little chance of Russia teaming up with Venezuela in a militarily meaningful way. "I don't think that Russia and Venezuela are really serious about putting together a military coalition that would give them any kind of aggregate military capability to oppose anybody," Meek said. "Frankly, the maneuvers they conducted down here were so basic and rudimentary that they did not amount to anything, in my opinion." And it's not just the Russian navy that is showing up in the West. In September, two Tu-160 long-range bombers, known in the West as Blackjacks, landed in Venezuela — the first landing in the Western Hemisphere by Russian military aircraft since the Cold War ended. Rice shrugs it off. "A few aging Blackjacks flying unarmed along the coast of Venezuela is — I don't know why one would do it, but I'm not particularly going to lose sleep over that," she said in an interview Monday. She said Russia is welcome to have relations with countries in the West. "I don't think anybody's confused about the preponderance of power in the Western Hemisphere," Rice said. On Monday, the Russian navy announced that a destroyer and two support vessels will visit Cuba for the first time since the Soviet era. The ships are from a squadron that has been on a lengthy visit to Latin America; they are scheduled to put in at Havana on Friday for a five-day stay, navy spokesman Capt. Igor Dygalo said. Moscow's support for Cuba fell sharply after the 1991 Soviet collapse, but the Russians have bolstered ties recently. The joint naval exercises with Venezuela were Russia's way of "demonstrating to the US that it has a foothold in a region traditionally dominated by the US," said analyst Anna Gilmour at Jane's Intelligence Review. Still, she and many Russian analysts say Moscow's deployments of warships are largely for show. |
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