Navy's hopes of revived glory scuppered

LONDON - With every hour that passes, the chances of any of the Kursk submarine crew surviving its sinking are dwindling. The likely outcome will be a human tragedy and another blow to the fragile, edgy pride of military Russia. The fate of the nuclear-powered submarine - the flagship of the Northern Fleet - has strong symbolic significance for the Kremlin.

After two failed rescue attempts, the third in serious trouble and with time running out it seemed last night that the last vestige of hope hung with a scheme to lift the submarine from the sea floor.

If this fails, it will be the first major disaster President Vladimir Putin has had to deal with since coming to power, and a test of his ability to comfort and sustain, as well as to rule.

An untested politician and product of the foreign intelligence apparat, Putin rose to power on the back of Boris Yeltsin's senescence and the war in Chechnya. He has not, so far, had to expend emotional or political capital on shoring up his authority. Perhaps because of the vast scale of the Russian Federation, its diverse population is highly engaged in and affected by national tragedies. Those that emphasise the gap between the faded power of the "Great Soviet Union" and associated mythologies and battered, confused present-day Russia are especially deeply felt.

Putin donned an admiral's uniform when he went to inspect the Northern Fleet after his election, a significant gesture intended to remind the armed forces that he, rather than any uppity defence minister or ambitious general, is ultimately in charge of Russia's future and the projection of its military force.

This costume drama has been followed by more concrete undertakings. Last week's National Security Council meeting was a bridgehead for his armed forces reform agenda. The outcome was highly welcome to the West. The commitment to provide real and unsparing strategic focus, an honest assessment of the country's decaying nuclear capability and commitment to cut back on inter-continental ballistic missiles are Putin's way of telling Russia's conservative military men to get real. Until now, the resigned joke within the Russian Army was that the nuclear forces had been "decaying according to plan."

The President also seems to have settled the tug-of-war over the future of military doctrine and the place of nuclear weapons in that vision in favour of the more open-minded chief-of-staff of the armed forces, Anatoli Kvashnin, and against the hide-bound defence minister, Marshall Igor Sergeyev.

The only caveat is that Russians have heard at least some of this before. First Yuri Andropov, then Mikhail Gorbachev, recognised that the military doctrine which had led the USSR into humiliation in Afghanistan and eaten up the defence budget preparing to fight a war to keep the satellite states of Eastern European within the sphere of influence had ended in tears, humiliation and retreat. Yeltsin vowed to reform the armed forces only to end up in an ungainly wrestling match with a succession of appalling defence ministers, the desperate, ill-considered intervention in Chechnya and subsequent humiliation.

Putin was the beneficiary of this chaos and carnage. That does not mean that he is immune from the pressures that came to weigh so heavily on his predecessors. He may be smart: but then neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin - before drink and illness got him - were stupid.

Russians speak of the new President as bringing "a year of hope" - the very modesty of the compliment being a recognition of their low expectations of success.

At such a time, the Barents Sea disaster is a highly inconvenient distraction. As the land forces have declined in status, bedevilled by their role in Afghanistan and the high casualty rate suffered in Chechnya, the Navy has come to be seen as the most reliable and best-trained of the services.

In the wake of Nato's Kosovo intervention, where the Russian Navy was so short-shipped and short-staffed that it could not provide adequate naval intelligence, Putin made clear that he intends to revive it as a modestly sized but efficient force. The image of a trapped submarine, forfeited to the sea in these most sensitive of international waters, is badly at odds with the image of revived maritime glory and confident projection of power.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin struggled to pit their reforming zeal against the grimmer realities of Russian life, and lost. When the gap between the two grew too wide, their leaderships became mere survival battles. From that point on, very little reform gets done at all. Putin knows that he needs one big institutional reform under way early in his presidency to provide a solid base. The armed forces are the obvious place to start. Two pillars support his presidency - the domestic and the international. Both will be strengthened if he succeeds.

He has no shortage of brand-new friends in the West. A new United States President, be it Bush or Gore, will have no interest in picking a fight with a halfway reasonable Russian leader. For all the alarmist talk of the impact on US-Russian relations of the proposed US Nuclear Missile Defence (NMD) programme, some senior Russian officials are privately far more relaxed at the prospect than Western liberal opponents. Indeed, Putin's incisions into the nuclear stockpiles indicate that he has a clear understanding of how different the post Cold War order really is to the old bi-polar world.

Of course, NMD, like any major shift in the security architecture, needs to be conducted steadily and carefully. Whether the technology works now is not the point. The likelihood is that it will be made to work some day in the none-too-distant future.

The outcome of Putin's reforms are uncertain. We know that the reigning in of the corrupt business oligarchs and the reconfiguration of nuclear capability and the armed forces are positive beginnings but we also know how vulnerable Russia's leaders are to the corrosive seepage of internal resistance and the undermining of their first year of hope. None of that has not changed.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Online stories: Russian sub in distress

Russian Centre for Arms Control: OSKAR subs

World Navies Today: Russian subs

Russian Navy official website