Andrei Kozyrev
Andrei Vladimirovich Kozyrev is a Russian politician and businessman who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Boris Yeltsin, during the Russian SFSR from 1990 and during the Russian Federation from 1992, in office until 1996. Kozyrev was seen as supporting Yeltsin's liberal democratic outlook and tried to develop Russia's foreign policy immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union to no longer see NATO as a threat, pursue integration with the West, and not assert itself in the former Soviet countries. Kozyrev's pro-Western and liberal foreign policy fell out of favor because of NATO expansion that began from 1995, and he was replaced by Yevgeny Primakov in early 1996, who represented Russian "security state" interests.
Towards the end of his tenure Kozyrev took a more conservative position, arguing to Western diplomats that hardline nationalists were the alternative to the Yeltsin administration, and that NATO expansion risked encouraging nationalist politics within Russia.
He was the Russian representative during the signing of the Oslo I and Oslo II Accords, and the Israel–Jordan peace treaty. Kozyrev had graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations with a PhD in history before joining the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1974, holding various positions in it before being appointed foreign minister.
Early life and education
Kozyrev was born in Brussels in 1951, the son of a Soviet engineer temporarily working there. He was educated at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, a school for diplomats operated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before beginning his studies there in 1969, he spent a year as a fitter in the Kommunar machine-building factory in Moscow. He is partly Jewish.Soviet diplomatic career
Kozyrev completed his studies in 1974. He entered the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a speech writer and researcher in the Department of International Organizations, which was responsible for issues concerning the United Nations and arms control, including biological and chemical warfare issues. Over the next three years, he earned a post-graduate degree in historical science and published several books on the arms trade and the United Nations.Kozyrev's career in the Foreign Ministry marked him as a promising young Soviet diplomat. He became an attaché in the Department of International Organizations in 1979 and third secretary the next year. Promotions came regularly: he became second secretary in 1982; first secretary in 1984; counselor in 1986. Following the reorganization of the ministry by Gorbachev's foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, he became deputy chief of the renamed Administration of International Organizations in 1988. The next year Kozyrev became chief of the administration, replacing a man 20 years his senior.
Kozyrev was promoted to the diplomatic rank of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary — the highest diplomatic rank in the Soviet Union — by the Decree of the President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev of 12 December 1990 No. UP-1177.
Russian Foreign Minister
Seizing the opportunity opened by Gorbachev's glasnost in summer 1989, Kozyrev wrote an article repudiating the Leninist concept of the "international class struggle", the very essence of Leninism. Firstly published in the Soviet press, the article was reproduced in The Washington Post and other major news sources all over the world, making him known as a political figure.In October 1990, a rebellious parliament of the Russian Federation voted to appoint Kozyrev the foreign minister. After the failed Soviet coup attempt of 1991, he found himself in president Boris Yeltsin's team of young reformers, which included Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, and shared their Western liberal-democratic ideals. He became Russian foreign minister at the age of 39 and gained and kept the confidence of Boris Yeltsin as Russia became an independent state and, in many ways, the successor to the Soviet Union. Kozyrev tried to make Russia a partner with the West in the formation of the post-Cold War world. He emphasized cooperation over conflict with the United States while insisting that Russia be treated as a great power in international politics rather than as a fallen superpower. He favored major arms control agreements with the United States and the nonproliferation of nuclear arms. He was also viewed by many as one of the most important voices for liberalism and democracy in post-communist Russia.
Kozyrev was one of the drafters of the Belovezh Accords. He wrote in his 2019 memoir: "The signed document establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States was in effect a death sentence for the Soviet Union, the largest country on earth and our fatherland. It was an emotional moment for us. Yet we knew it was inevitable, and we had done our best to avoid a much more disastrous outcome."
In 1992 Kozyrev together with nine other Ministers of Foreign Affairs from the Baltic Sea area, and an EU commissioner, founded the Council of the Baltic Sea States and the EuroFaculty.
According to Dmitri Simes, in the spring of 1992 Kozyrev told former U.S. president Richard Nixon during his visit to Moscow that Russia had suffered from focusing on itself at the expense of the world, and he defined the new Russian national interest as "universal human values." Nixon had asked him what the new Russian government considered Russia's national interests to be. After their conversation, Nixon thought that Kozyrev was "a nice man" but risked weakening his own position in the eyes of the Russian public if he followed the United States on all foreign policy questions, and that this would make the U.S. look guilty by association.
On 15 December 1992, Kozyrev underlined his opposition to conservative, nationalistic forces in Russia with a dramatic and unprecedented diplomatic maneuver. He stunned the foreign ministers of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Russian delegation alike with a speech that echoed many of the positions of the nationalist opposition in Russia, and seemed to threaten a return to anti-Western policies. But an hour after giving the speech he retracted it, warning that the views he had earlier espoused reflected "the demands of the most extreme elements of the opposition in Russia". He had reason to worry, for one month earlier Pravda had reported that he was "splitting into pieces the former socialist camp … Kozyrev in effect is paving the way for the expansion of a new American empire." Others accused the "young reformers" in the Gaidar government of breaking "historical" ties with Warsaw Pact partners and Kozyrev of abandoning the "traditional" zone of Russian interests thanks to his obsession with a pro-Western foreign policy. The CSCE speech occurred a scant five days after the defenestration of Gaidar.
Kozyrev painted Yevgeny Primakov, his contemporary at the newly formed SVR, as a reactionary who entertained "the usual prejudices against NATO."
At the UN General Assembly Kozyrev declared in 1993, by the time of the Sukhumi massacre of the War in Abkhazia : "Russia realizes that no international organization or group of states can replace our peacekeeping efforts in this specific post-Soviet space."
Kozyrev tried to promote the idea of dual nationality in the former Soviet empire but was unsuccessful.
There is still some question as to his role in the confusion of Yeltsin over the German re-unification and Helsinki Final Act and ensuing Partnership for Peace push for NATO expansion. The window of opportunity to bring Russia into NATO closed by the end of Yeltsin's first term of office because the only way to avoid an explosion of fear in Russia was to bring Russia out of the cold first before the other Warsaw Pact countries; in the event, the opposite was done.
US Secretaries of State that were his opposite number during his tenure were: Jim Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren Christopher.
NATO expansion
In the summer of 1995 Kozyrev wrote in Foreign Policy that "Western politicians, again Americans in particular, have increasingly tended to substitute a strategy of a rapid expansion of NATO without its fundamental transformation for partnership between the alliance and Eastern Europe, including Russia. This course of action is fraught with the danger of redemarcating Europe. It also encourages the growth of anti-Western and imperial political forces in Russia and would again bring about a Western rejection of partnership and a split in Europe." His conclusion was that the Russian public expects its government to defend its security and economic interests abroad, and Russian democrats had to be able to do this to maintain their own domestic credibility, without accusations from the Western countries of imperialism. He also wrote that the continued insistence on seeing Russia as a security threat in Europe implies to Russians that it does not matter what ideology or views their government has.NNPT and conflict with Ukraine over Crimea
In October 1991 Vice President Alexander Rutskoi went to Kyiv to negotiate the price of Russian natural gas exports to Ukraine, and through Ukrainian territory to Europe. On that visit he also claimed Russian control and ownership of the Black Sea fleet, based in Sevastopol, and, indirectly, Russian sovereignty over the whole Crimean Peninsula. Rutskoi publicly warned Kyiv against conflict with Moscow, which both had nuclear weapons and had the ability to claim sovereignty over Crimea.In April 1992 and March 1993 two similar resolutions that claimed Crimea were passed by the Russian parliament. The Ukrainians turned for help to the United States, but it sought to aggregate Soviet nuclear weapons in the hands of Moscow and to occupy ex-Soviet scientists with the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction programme. The Budapest Memorandum, which was co-written by Kozyrev, provided security assurances to the three minor ex-Soviet countries in exchange for their accession to the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty and security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. By the end of 1996 all nuclear weapons were removed to Russian territory, and 18 years later Vladimir Putin reneged on the deal when he invaded Crimea and the Donbas.