After all the precarious U.S.-Russian negotiations and hard bargaining over the role of the Russian contingent attached to the NATO-led Peace Implementation Force in Bosnia and the creation of special arrangements for the control and command of Russian troops, the final result seems baffling. The Russians are sending into Bosnia a small trip-wire force that, obviously, can exercise a very limited peace-enforcement capability. And even this symbolic unit can only reach Bosnia, if the Russian Federation Council approves of the expedition and also finds extra financing for this deployment.


In October Defense Minister Pavel Grachev told William Perry, his U.S. counterpart, that he was prepared to send an entire division of 12,000 to 14,000 troops to Bosnia. In October some NATO military attach?s in Moscow genuinely believed that Grachev intended such a deployment and was not using it as a bargaining chip.


The next month, the Russian negotiators mentioned a five-battalion strong brigade of 5,000 to 6,000 men. But in the end the Russian peace-enforcement effort waned to a token airborne brigade made up of two battalions with no more than 1,200 to 1,500 men. Many countries with significantly smaller armies than Russia -- for example Pakistan, Italy or Canada -- are deploying more peacekeepers in Bosnia.


But what is more important than sheer numbers of Russian troops is the composition of the Russian unit that will be under U.S.-NATO command. The Russian brigade is basically not so much a peace-enforcing unit as a classic UN-type lightly armed peacekeeping unit, intended not to fight battles, but to patrol, observe and report cease-fire violations.


In the Russian brigade there will not be any tanks but only APCs, lightly armed combat vehicles, and also several light guns -- all of which can be transported by air. The Russian peacekeeping battalion, which since March 1994 has been part of the UN Protection Force, or UNPROFOR, in the Sarajevo region, will most likely be redeployed in the Posavina corridor, where it will join the rest of the Russian troops in Bosnia. However, the Russian military is not planning to strengthen this battalion with heavy armaments from Russia. As a result, the Russian brigade does not at all resemble the armored and artillery units that the United States and other NATO countries are sending to Bosnia.


Naturally, to maintain a small, lightly armed unit in Bosnia is cheaper than a heavily armed one. Besides, the Russian military simply does not intend to fight anyone or enforce anything in Bosnia under U.S.-NATO command. U.S. General George Joulwan -- NATO's supreme military commander in Europe -- will be legally in operational control of Russian forces in Bosnia, but his ability to give them battle orders will be limited if the troops have hardly any offensive capabilities worth speaking of.


When the Yeltsin administration was deciding if it should participate in the NATO operation in Bosnia, a high-level general in the Russian General Staff told me: "We are not ready to fight either against the Serbs or the Moslems in Bosnia. We are only ready to patrol the cease-fire line if the sides are prepared to support the armistice. The General Staff is against equipping the Russian troops in Bosnia with heavy artillery and tanks. Besides, someone should pay us for our participation in the operation. There is no money for it in the 1996 military budget."


The Russians are not prepared to act robustly in Bosnia, especially against the Serbs. They will prefer to establish liaison and negotiate their way through. Last week, General Nikolai Staskov defied Western criticism and met with General Radko Mladic in Bosnia to establish better understanding. (In January 1995 General Staskov, deputy commander of the Airborne Forces in charge of peacekeeping, was dismissed by General Anatoly Kvashin, the then commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, as commander of the Western army group for cowardice during the battle of Grozny. The accusations were later dropped and Staskov was not discharged from the Armed Forces.)


But to compensate for the weakness of the Russian ground forces in Bosnia, Moscow has sent to the Mediterranean its only capable aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov. The Kuznetsov will be much more independent in its operations than the Russian troops in Bosnia, and its fighters (Su-27, Mig-29, Su-25) and cruise missiles can deter any party that could otherwise push the small Russian ground force around.





Pavel Felgenhauer is defense and national security editor for Segodnya.