WHAT’S NEXT BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE U.S?
ANALYZING THE RELATION BETWEEN THE NEW BIDEN ADMINISTRATION AND THE RUSSIAN RESPONSE
Analysis by Luis Santaella
Theodore Roosevelt once said: “Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action […]”. And we can agree how special the rhetoric applied by President Biden since the beginning of his administration has been. Let’s review the context. Former president Donald Trump was widely accused of Russian-friendly foreign policy, and it is true that Putin’s government had a break from hostilities during most of Trump’s administration. A relationship that had its worst moment during 2014 because of the Ukrainian referendum and the Syrian war, finally appeared to find calm and silence for certain moments. This was not without controversy, however, as sanctions on Russian oligarchs stopped, public statements were meaningless and less common, and the global pandemic seemed to distract the U.S from condemning an alleged intervention on electoral outcomes.
Nevertheless, Biden’s triumph was based on the promise of going anti-Trump on foreign policy (Lake, 2021): the White house started investigations on the 2016 election, made loud statements on the support for Ukrainian sovereignty and reinforced its commitment to NATO, while Biden himself delivered multiple speeches pointing to Russia as a disruption to democracy (Mackinnon, 2021; U.S. Department of State, 2021). This is bad news for Russia since the intention of adding Ukraine and Georgia to NATO would mean an escalation of troop deployment near the Russian border, something that cannot be ignored (McFaul, 2021).
Russia’s Reaction
An eight-point draft was recently sent by the Russian Foreign Minister to the U.S concerning European securitization (Roth, 2021). This has been the most relevant response to Biden’s rhetoric against Russia, since so far, only brief statements and public responses by Putin were the response to the American hostility - for instance, when Biden criticized the arrestment of Navalny (main Russian political opposite) and Putin accused him of having double standards for not dealing with the Capitol incident in the first place (BBC, 2021).
Meanwhile, the list of demands includes the reduction of troops in Eastern Europe and the ban of an integration of Ukraine into NATO. Although this draft has been labeled as a good sign in the best cases, it is important to point out two factors:
1. The draft, even though it was concerning security and militarization in Europe, was delivered to the U.S after an agreement on a video call between Putin and Biden to look for diplomatic solutions. However, Biden has threatened Russia publicly to avoid an intervention on Ukraine following the Donbass conflict. This is important since the Russian reaction towards the U.S policy was very silent until this draft.
2. Russia has claimed they are looking for legal guarantees of their own sovereignty. It’s important to analyze this as a chain of events. Although we remain neutral concerning military mobilization, we have to assume Russia sees Ukraine as a matter of homeland security, and its policies of trying to protect its borders could be hard to challenge, even with a direct threat made by its biggest political rival, namely, the US. Also, the sudden public reaction, after a period of abstention towards commenting on American Foreign Policy, could be seen as an accumulated saturation by the hostility of the Western speech against Russia.
