Текст книги "Implosion. The end of Russia and what it means for America"

Автор книги: Ilan Berman

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In addition, several small Tatar organizations—among them Ittifak, Milli Mejlis, and elements within the All-Tatar Public Center—have Islamist tendencies. ²²But the Islamist group with the most organized presence in Russia is the grassroots missionary organization known as Hizb-ut Tahrir (HuT). While formally eschewing religious violence, HuT pursues a phased agenda whose long-term goal is the creation of a caliphate and the imposition of Islamic law in the numerous countries and regions where it is active. ²³There is a strong correlation between membership in HuT and the eventual embrace of religiously motivated violence—so much so that experts have likened the group to a “conveyor belt of extremism.” ²⁴

HuT has been formally banned in Russia since February 2003, when the country’s Supreme Court designated it and fourteen other entities as terrorist groups. The Russian government has steadily persecuted the group since, launching a number of investigations into suspected criminal and terrorist activities by its members. Nevertheless, HuT’s activities in Russia have grown steadily over the past decade, with evidence of HuT cells stretching from Tatarstan to Siberia. ²⁵

The growth in radical Islamic ideas has been accompanied by a surge in religiously motivated violence. In the summer of 2012, for example, Valiulla Yakupov, a prominent Islamic cleric who had previously served as the deputy spiritual head of Tatarstan, was shot and killed outside of his home in Kazan. Almost simultaneously, Ildus Faizov, the region’s chief mufti, was injured by a bomb planted in his car. ²⁶Both men were well known for their active opposition to the spread of radical Islam and their work in preaching a more moderate, inclusive brand of the faith. ²⁷As such, the attacks represented a very public rejection of the established religious status quo in the region.

Tatarstan is not the only part of the Russian heartland locked in an intensifying battle with Islamic radicalism. Neighboring Bashkortostan—whose capital city, Ufa, serves as the spiritual seat of Muslims in eastern Russia—is also under siege. There has been a marked growth in grassroots Islamist militancy and widespread banditry in the region over the last three years. ²⁸This instability contributed to the ouster of the region’s long-serving president, Murtaza Rakhimov, in the summer of 2010, and his subsequent replacement with a new, Kremlin-selected strongman, Rustem Khamitov. A new offensive against Islamic militants and ethnic separatists followed. ²⁹Nevertheless, sustained violence by both Islamists and extreme nationalists became so acute over the following year and a half that in December 2012, the Kremlin took the unprecedented step of dispatching internal security forces to quell the instability—the first time it had done so since the fall of the Soviet Union. ³⁰

For years, experts such as Yana Amelina and Rais Suleymanov of the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies and Gordon Hahn of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have warned of the growing influence of Wahhabis in the region. ³¹To them, the steady growth of radical Islam is part of a deepening struggle for the soul of the Russian state—a struggle that Moscow has not yet begun to fight in earnest.

HARD POWER, NOT SMART POWER

The rise of Islamic radicalism in Russia underscores the bankruptcy of the Kremlin’s approach to counterterrorism. Russia’s leaders long have gambled that their counterterrorism policies, however bloody, would remain popular so long as ordinary Russians believed the Islamist threat to be both marginal and distant. Yet numerous high-profile terrorist incidents in recent years—including the 2002 hostage-taking at Moscow’s Nord-Ost theater, the 2004 Beslan school massacre, the 2009 bombing of the Moscow metro, and the 2011 Domodedovo attack—have increasingly made that gamble look like a losing one.

Why have Russian efforts to combat Islamic radicalism failed? Much of the problem lies in the way Moscow conceptualizes its struggle with Islamic forces. Indeed, while some in Russia recognize the need for an “intellectual war” against Islamic extremism, ³²the Kremlin’s approach remains overwhelmingly kinetic. The Russian military’s engagement in the Caucasus over the past two decades can best be described as a scorched-earth policy that has left more than a hundred thousand citizens dead. (In 2005, an unofficial Chechen estimate placed the combined death toll from the two Chechen wars at 160,000. ³³Official tallies offered by Moscow are more modest.)

Belatedly, the Kremlin and regional governments have begun to try a softer approach that includes greater economic investment in the Caucasus and outreach initiatives designed to engage, and moderate, regional Islamists. ³⁴But the brutality of Russia’s hard-power policies have overshadowed these steps and led to widespread disaffection with Moscow.

The feeling is increasingly mutual; as the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Alexei Malashenko has put it, most Russians have come to see the Caucasus as their “internal abroad”—an area qualitatively different from the rest of Russia, which must be pacified rather than engaged. ³⁵

Runaway regional corruption plays a large role in this hostility. The Russian government has come to rely on a succession of Kremlin-approved strongmen to maintain local order in its majority-Muslim republics—and to preserve their allegiance to Moscow. It has also subsidized most of their expenses; estimates suggest the Kremlin currently provides between 60 and 80 percent of the operating budgets of regional republics such as Chechnya. ³⁶But accountability and transparency have lagged far behind. Not surprisingly, corruption and graft have proliferated, and the Caucasus has gained global notoriety anew for its criminality and lawlessness.

In response, Russian officials have proposed an array of remedial measures intended to make regional governments more transparent and accountable. ³⁷Yet these steps remain mostly notional; experts say that substantive changes to entrenched cronyism are hard to find.

The Kremlin’s response to Islamism has been particularly feeble in Russia’s heartland. Despite the warning signs, there is still little official recognition from Moscow that the country’s heartland is fast becoming a battleground between insurgent Islam and the state, much the way the North Caucasus did some two decades ago. In December 2012, for example, Fariz Askerzade, the head of Tatarstan’s Shi’a community, penned an open letter to Russian president Vladimir Putin beseeching him for protection against rising Islamic radicalism in the region. ³⁸He’s still waiting for an answer.

This passivity has been encouraged by regional officials, who have been quick to reassure the federal government and the general public that radical Islamic activism remains “under control.” ³⁹

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

For years, the Russian state has waged unrelenting ground warfare against Islamist elements on its periphery instead of implementing a real, broad-based strategy to combat and compete with radical Islam. Such an approach, however, is unsustainable.

Although Russia has experienced a post-Soviet religious revival, observance among Russian Muslims today remains limited—a legacy of the Soviet Union’s forcibly imposed atheism and religious repression. According to Russian studies, just one-fifth of the country’s ethnic Muslims actively practice the faith. ⁴⁰And among those who do, support for Islamism is not widespread. ⁴¹

But the Kremlin’s policies have the ability to change all that. As Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation puts it, “Russia’s entire counterinsurgency strategy is in question. Its primary goal is ‘to make the local population less afraid of the law enforcement than the insurgents,’ but the overly violent Russian approach has often produced the polar opposite.” ⁴²Moreover, experts caution against underestimating the resilience—and the appeal—of radical religious ideas. “All this talk of Abkhazis, Ossetians or Tatars not being pre-disposed to major Islamism is nonsense,” Moscow-based scholar Yana Amelina maintains. “Unfortunately, all [of them] are susceptible to radical Islamist ideology.” ⁴³

Even more crucial, time is working against Moscow. Negative demographic trends have hit Russia’s Slavs the hardest, while Russia’s Muslim population is thriving. The practical effect is that the Russians most adversely affected by the Kremlin’s draconian counterterrorism policies—the country’s Muslim underclass—are the ones emerging as the most decisive demographic group and important political player in Russia’s future.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE FAR EAST FLASH POINT

In July 2000, newly elected Russian president Vladimir Putin made an official trek out to the country’s distant Far East. He went there to deliver a stark warning. “If you do not take practical steps to advance the Far East soon,” Putin told an audience in Blagoveshchensk, a wind-swept city of two hundred thousand souls situated on the banks of the Amur River, opposite China, “after a few decades the Russian population [here] will be speaking Japanese, Chinese and Korean.” ¹

The new president was encouraging his countrymen to come to terms with a sobering reality: in the country’s resource-rich east, which serves as its economic engine and the repository of its prodigious energy wealth, the Russian state is receding. The People’s Republic of China, meanwhile, is advancing, both economically and demographically.

At the time Putin issued his candid assessment, the number of Russians living in Siberia and the Far East (a territory of more than four million square miles) ²stood at twenty-eight million—merely 19 percent of the country’s overall population. ³But the latest Russian census, carried out in 2010, pegs the number of citizens in Siberia and the Russian Far East at just 25.4 million—or fewer than six inhabitants per square mile. ⁴By contrast, the population density in China’s Heilongjiang province, opposite the Russian regions of Amur, Khabarovsk, Primorskii Krai, and the Jewish Autonomous Region, is approximately thirty-five times that: between 210 and 220 citizens per square mile. ⁵

And the disparity is growing. The negative population trends evident elsewhere in Russia—high mortality, low birth rates, and massive emigration—are also affecting its Far East. Although the area accounts for more than a third of Russia’s territory, the Far East remains an economic and political backwater—one that until very recently garnered little attention from the Kremlin. ⁶

But if Moscow has neglected the Far East until now, the same cannot be said of Beijing. China’s political, economic, and demographic footprint in Russia’s east is large and expanding.

UNEASY NEIGHBORS

There is historical precedent for China’s interest, and for Russia’s concerns. In fact, the two countries have contested much of the area for centuries. Its status as a Russian holding is relatively new—and increasingly fragile.

Until the seventeenth century, the territory of today’s Far East remained largely unpopulated, claimed at times by the Russian Empire and at others by warring Chinese clans. In 1689, the Treaty of Nerchinsk—signed to end fighting between the Qing Dynasty and Russian settlers in the Amur Valley—granted control of much of the area to China. But successive centuries saw Russia begin to populate the region in earnest, solidifying its claims through a series of treaties (specifically the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Peking two years later). China never fully accepted Russian claims to the Far East, but the barrenness of the territory and its distance from the seat of Chinese power in Peking conspired to keep the conflict muted. The two countries would continue to contest the territory, however, even engaging in an isolated military skirmish along the Amur River in 1969. ⁷

It was not until the 1980s, when Soviet Russia and Red China began a process of political reconciliation, that real progress began to be made on resolving the status of the Far East. By the late 1990s, nearly all of the outstanding territorial disputes between the two countries had been resolved (largely in Moscow’s favor). The remainder was formally ended in 2001, when Moscow and Beijing inked the Treaty on Friendship and Good Neighborliness.

That twenty-five-point agreement, signed with great fanfare in Moscow in July 2001 by Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, was intended as a codification of a new era of Sino-Russian cooperation—and a manifestation of their shared desire for “multi-polarity” and a diminution of America’s global influence. ⁸But the treaty, like Russian-Chinese cooperation itself, is temporary. Despite Russian requests for an agreement of indefinite duration during the negotiating process, the Chinese insisted on a time limit for the deal. That demand was incorporated into the final text of the agreement that was signed by Jiang and Putin, and said treaty now formally “sunsets” in 2021.

The implication is clear. Looking two decades ahead in 2001, Beijing believed that the demographic balance between itself and Russia, and the larger bilateral strategic relationship, would be quite different. By 2021, with population trends working in its favor, China might well want to revisit its presence in the Far East with an eye toward reclaiming lost lands.

A CREEPING CHINESE ADVANCE

But the Chinese government may not be content to wait that long. In recent years, China has attempted to speed the process of Russia’s decline, and its own advance, in the Far East.

For years, Russian experts have warned that Russia’s eastern regions are being overrun by Chinese migrants. ⁹While exact numbers are difficult to determine, estimates range from as many as 1.5 to 2 million Chinese nationals in Russia’s Far East. ¹⁰

The actual number is almost certainly much lower. A 2003 study by the American Foreign Policy Council estimated that there were fewer than 150,000 Chinese nationals throughout Russia’s entire Far East. ¹¹A survey by China’s state-controlled People’ s Dailythe following year put the number of permanent, legal Chinese residents in Russia’s East at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. ¹²Today, that number is considerably larger—about four hundred thousand by Western estimates—making clear that China’s presence in the Russian Far East is increasing.

Some of that growth is a result of the thirty thousand Chinese tourists who visit the region daily. Tellingly, anecdotal evidence suggests that many of these visits are driven by more than simple curiosity; rather, many Chinese say they are returning to the region as absentee landlords looking after lost ancestral lands. ¹³Not surprisingly, some of these tourists do not return home. ¹⁴

Chinese also make up a major part of the Far East’s labor force. The economies of the Far East’s regions are oriented overwhelmingly toward China. ¹⁵It only stands to reason, then, that they would rely heavily on Chinese workers to fuel that trade. And they do: in 2006, some 210,000 Chinese were legally registered to work in Russia—ten times the number registered in 1994. ¹⁶Most reside in the Russian Far East. (The number of illegal Chinese migrant workers, which is not regularly tallied by Russian authorities, makes the actual size of the Chinese labor force in Russia larger, perhaps substantially so.)

This growth of Chinese migration to Russia is at least partly a product of China’s expanding economy (which has averaged a stunning pace of 10.5 percent annually since 2007). ¹⁷Beijing must now create twenty-five million jobs annually to keep its unemployment rate static. ¹⁸This requirement has led the Chinese government to encourage labor migration abroad, to Latin America, elsewhere in Asia, in Africa—and to neighboring Russia. China’s local governments have also encouraged labor migration to the Far East. ¹⁹

Meanwhile, the Far East’s desolation and its distance from European Russia generally (and Moscow specifically) have reduced Russia’s indigenous workforce. During Soviet times, Communist Party restrictions on citizen mobility kept the Far East’s population in place. But a post-Soviet relaxation of travel regulations has prompted an exodus from Russia’s desolate east. Since the Soviet collapse, an estimated two million Russians have departed the region, most for economic or social reasons, taking much of the area’s labor with them. ²⁰By some estimates, the region has lost as much as one-fifth of its total population over the past two decades. ²¹

Those who have remained aren’t exactly the best and the brightest. “The Russian labor force in the Far East of the country is highly marginalized,” explains Natalia Zubarevich, director of regional programs of the Independent Institute for Social Policy. “Those people are presumably alcoholics who do not have high working skills. Moreover, this force is very expensive against the background of the Chinese.” ²²In other words, Russia has lost the comparative labor advantage to China on its southeastern flank.

Finally, China is winning the investment battle. The resource-rich Russian Far East has become a hub for Chinese commerce—a freewheeling marketplace where China’s hungry entrepreneurs are pressing their luck. In recent years, savvy Chinese investors have succeeded in setting up special economic zones in places such as the Amur Region, the Jewish Autonomous Region, Primorye, and Khabarovsk. ²³Investment dollars have followed; in 2011, Chinese speculators poured $3 billion into projects in Russia’s Far East—more than three times the amount of money allocated by Moscow. ²⁴

While much of the Chinese migration to Russia’s Far East is legitimate, some of it is undoubtedly happening illegally. Today, there is a consensus among Russian officials that many Chinese nationals live in Russia. Where they disagree is on how many there actually are—and whether their presence is a threat to Russian security.

In response to the influx of Chinese in the Far East, Russia has attempted to curb—or at least control—the movement of Chinese nationals into its territory. It has done so by shortening the number of days allotted on work visas for Chinese visitors; requiring official sponsors for these individuals in both Russia and China; and increasing official searches for illegal Chinese migrants. ²⁵

Russia has also instituted protectionist policies aimed at limiting the ability of Chinese workers to settle and prosper within the Russian Federation. In September 2012, for example, Russia’s Amur Region followed in the footsteps of cities such as Krasnoyarsk, Chelyabinsk, and Nizhny Novgorod and banned Chinese migrant farmers from cultivating land there in the future. ²⁶

But the trend line appears relentless. The demographics of the Russian Far East are slowly changing. And, despite the various exclusionary efforts of Russia’s regional governments, they are changing in China’s favor. As a 2006 study of the subject in the Asia Timesput it, “Chinese expansion is [now] a fact of life in the Russian Far East, and there is little Russia can do to stop it.” ²⁷

HIGH STAKES

The transformation now underway in the Far East could help determine Russia’s economic well-being—and its aspirations on the world stage. In recent years, the ongoing economic crisis in Europe, as well as Russia’s growing political tensions with Eurozone countries, has prompted the Kremlin to look east for new markets to aid its domestic modernization, secure new economic opportunities, and help restore its status as a great power. ²⁸

By necessity, Russia’s resource-rich Far East looms large in this calculus. The region has been likened to an “energy superpower”—an area with vast, and as yet largely untapped, hydrocarbon wealth. Indeed, the island of Sakhalin alone is estimated to have deposits totaling fourteen billion barrels of oil and 2.7 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. ²⁹Other resources, from softwood lumber to natural gas and precious metals, are also abundant. Yet although Sakhalin and other parts of Russia’s east have become a magnet for foreign—including Western—investment, the endemic culture of corruption that permeates virtually every aspect of post-Soviet society in Russia has deterred more conservative investors and slowed economic development.

The Kremlin understands this. President Putin has declared publicly that the modernization of the Far East—and, by extension, a closer linkage with Russia’s “federal center”—represents the “most important geopolitical task” facing Russia. ³⁰His government has matched its words with economic investments. Over the past decade, the Russian government has made a concerted effort to invest in the Far East. In 2007, it launched a “Federal Targeted Program” for the Far East and Trans-Baikal regions, earmarking $22 billion for their development. ³¹Two years later, it went even further, implementing a new strategy that envisioned a three-stage process of development that would dramatically increase regional economic productivity by 2025. ³²

But despite these steps, real, broad-based development of the Far East remains mostly a dream for a simple reason. For all the lofty rhetoric, Russia’s plans depend heavily on corresponding investments in the area from neighboring Asian nations. ³³And so far, none have economically engaged Russia’s east. None, that is, except China.

COOPERATION NOW . . .

The conflict over the Far East is not yet at the forefront of relations between Moscow and Beijing. For the moment, improving bilateral diplomatic, economic, and military cooperation remains a cardinal priority for both countries.

These ties are driven in part by fears of Western encroachment. Back in 1997, Alexei Arbatov, then chairman of the Military Commission of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, expressed this concern explicitly. If the United States and its allies used NATO to continue to press in on Russia from the west, Arbatov warned, Russia, too, would have to look east—to new partners in Asia. ³⁴And look east Moscow did. In 1997, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Chinese premier Jiang Zemin issued a joint communiqué emphasizing the need for “multipolarity” in global affairs—a thinly veiled reference to joint opposition to America’s perceived post–Cold War hegemony.

Since then, the Sino-Russian partnership has expanded significantly. For example, Russia has pledged to side with the PRC in the event of a conflict over Taiwan—one of China’s primary national security priorities. In the summer of 2000, President Putin told President Jiang that the Russian Pacific Fleet stood ready to “block the path of U.S. naval vessels heading to Taiwan” if war ever broke out between the island nation and Mainland China. ³⁵

Moscow backed up its support with concrete strategic assistance. In 2004, the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission and the Pentagon both reported that Russia had sold China sophisticated weaponry as part of the latter’s preparations for a conflict in the Taiwan Strait. ³⁶The following year, China and Russia launched their first ever joint military exercises in the Yellow Sea, staging a mock invasion of a third country in a not-so-subtle simulation of a takeover of Taiwan. ³⁷Russia has also supported China in opposing Taiwan diplomatically. When then Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian called a referendum over the island nation’s bid to join the United Nations, Russia equated the move with “dangerous splittism.” Owing at least in part to Moscow’s opposition, the UN ultimately rejected Taiwan’s effort. ³⁸

Russia and China have also banded together to erect an anti-Western partnership in Central Asia. In 2003, the two countries jointly launched the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—a six-member bloc incorporating the Central Asian states and designed at least in part to serve as a counterweight to NATO and the United States in the post-Soviet space. While the immediate goals of the bloc are to strengthen counterterrorism and military coordination among member states, the geopolitical objectives are clear. The SCO, China’s official People’ s Dailyhas explained, gives member states “the ability and responsibility to safeguard the security of the Central Asian region”—and to demand “Western countries to leave Central Asia.” ³⁹

Military cooperation between the two countries has blossomed as well. In the 1990s, the Russian government, seeking to capitalize on the lucrative remnants of Soviet militarism amid turbulent post–Cold War economic times, sold many high-tech arms to China. By 1997, close to half of Russia’s foreign military sales (approximately $2 billion a year) went to China. ⁴⁰By the early 2000s, that figure had grown to $4 billion annually under a five-year plan negotiated by Moscow and Beijing. In the process, Moscow, in the words of one analyst, became “Beijing’s ‘logistics base.’” ⁴¹

Bilateral trade has risen dramatically. Throughout the 1990s, Moscow and Beijing enjoyed strong political ties, but weak economic ones, averaging between $5 and $7 billion annually as a result of Russia’s post-Soviet political instability. ⁴²But the 2000s saw a massive surge in economic cooperation between the two countries. By 2011, trade had rocketed to $83.5 billion a year. ⁴³

And Russian and Chinese officials are seeking still more growth; at their summer 2012 summit, Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, codified the ambitious goal of more than doubling trade—to $200 billion annually—by the end of the decade. ⁴⁴

This cooperation is not without its detractors. A decade ago, Russian nationalists such as the late General Alexandr Lebed pointedly warned that their government’s policy of high-tech sales to China could lead to a growing strategic imbalance between the two—one that would put Moscow at a profound disadvantage if it and Beijing ever ended up going to war. ⁴⁵

Nevertheless, the long-standing consensus in Moscow remains that strategic cooperation with China serves a concrete, and financially rewarding, purpose. And because it does, the future of strategic ties between Moscow and Beijing is bright—or so it would seem.

. . . BUT COMPETITION LATER

Yet for all of the fanfare that has accompanied the Sino-Russian strategic partnership in recent years, there is a clear sense that today’s era of bilateral cooperation will not last. China, after all, is a rising power, in both economic and political terms. Russia, by contrast, is declining, Kremlin dreams of an economic resurgence in Asia notwithstanding. ⁴⁶Given this dynamic, the lure of an empty, resource-rich territorial expanse on its borders could well prove irresistible to the PRC in the not-too-distant future.

Russian officials understand this very well. Even if they tend not to say so publicly, fears of Chinese encroachment are never far from the minds of Russia’s elites. Thus, Sergei Karaganov of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy warned recently that the Russian Far East could “turn into an appendage of China” unless Moscow gets serious about reversing the PRC’s advance on its eastern periphery. ⁴⁷Russia’s leadership thinks much the same. In the summer of 2012, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev himself warned about the need to protect the Far East against “excessive expansion by bordering states”—a clear reference to China’s growing clout in the area. ⁴⁸

The Russian government is doing what it can to prevent—or at least delay—this encroachment. In the spring of 2012, a national development paper entitled Strategy 2020prepared for Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency focused for the first time on the need to counterbalance China economically. ⁴⁹Shortly thereafter, in May 2012, the Kremlin authorized the establishment of a dedicated ministry to oversee development of the Far East. ⁵⁰That ministry, established by presidential decree and headed by Victor Ishayev, the Kremlin’s special envoy for the development of the Far East, is a long overdue sign of seriousness on the part of the Russian government about the need for major, sustained economic and political attention to its distant eastern periphery.

But it faces an uphill battle. Chinese investments in Russia’s Far East far outpace those of the Russian government and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future. So do demographic trends, which clearly favor a rising (and resource-hungry) China over a declining Russia.

Given these realities, the Kremlin has begun to plan for the worst. In June 2010, Russia’s defense ministry launched “Vostok-2010,” a massive war game in the Far East and Siberia. The weeklong drills, which involved some twenty thousand soldiers from Russia’s army, navy, air force, and special WMD detachments, were unprecedented in their scope and aimed at ensuring what military officials termed, generically, “the security of national interests of the state in the Far East.” ⁵¹Some observers, however, had a more somber reading of the drills and the motivations behind them. “Russia is conducting these operations to reassure itself it can still control these sparsely populated regions,” respected Russian military analyst Alexander Golts told reporters at the time. ⁵²

Vostok-2010 was just the beginning. In the three years since, Russia has significantly beefed up its military presence and command structure in the Far East under the banner of military reforms. The Russian military’s Eastern Command, headquartered in Khabarovsk, now controls the country’s Pacific Fleet, the Far East, and most of Siberia, making it a veritable beachhead against potential Chinese incursion. ⁵³It has also deployed advanced military hardware, including units of its advanced S-400 air defense system, to the Far East. ⁵⁴

The implications are clear. For all of its public praise of the Sino-Russian partnership, Moscow sees its future with Beijing as one of competition and not cooperation. The Far East will be the front line of this future conflict, with Russia’s territorial integrity and its natural resource wealth the ultimate prize. Those are high stakes indeed.