Mutual interest alone could have produced a civil and professional working relationship between us. But over time, Vitaly and I developed something resembling a genuine friendship. UN culture was drearily buttoned up. Whether diplomats bloviated or spoke in monotone, they hewed closely to generic talking points. Some had strong views but were prevented by their governments from airing them. Others had been receiving “instructions” from their capitals for so long that they seemed to have suspended thinking for themselves. Vitaly was different.
He had a point of view—on everything from the sources of Alexander Ovechkin’s greatness as a hockey player to what China’s rise would mean for the world. Even when discussing issues on which Russia had scant Council support, he seemed to delight in playing the role of the underdog. He was also a masterful storyteller with an often irreverent sense of humor. When I once went on too long speaking before the Council, he responded, “After hearing all that the Permanent Representative of the United States felt she needed to share with us today, I am tempted to read my statement twice.” On another occasion, when we were arguing after a Council session, I told him that I knew he had mixed motives—“half sincere and half ulterior.”
“No,” he countered, “we are fully sincere about achieving our ulterior motive.”
Vitaly and his wife, Irina, a French teacher and translator, were avid theatergoers. I had established an unusual partnership with Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater in New York. Oskar would contact me when a new production was premiering, and we would brainstorm about whether it made sense to invite foreign diplomats. I considered these nights a wonderful means of employing American “soft power,” and the plays often transmitted subtle messages about the importance of human rights. Unlike some other foreign colleagues, Vitaly accepted every one of my invitations.
When I brought a dozen ambassadors to the Public Theater’s performance of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, he was the first to leap out of his chair to ignite a standing ovation. He did not hold it against me when the press covered his presence at the LGBT-themed musical Fun Home, an unusual night out for the representative of a famously homophobic government. At the intermission of Hamilton, he interrogated Cass, a professor of constitutional law, about whether creator Lin-Manuel Miranda had accurately depicted the Founding Fathers’ debates.
Vitaly and I both loved sports, and the only times he didn’t answer his phone were when Russia was competing in the Olympics or the World Cup. We brought each other to games (he favored hockey and tennis; I could never convince him that my favorite sport, baseball, was interesting, so we settled on the NBA). I also introduced him to FX’s Cold War drama The Americans, which he claimed was “a bit ridiculous,” but nonetheless watched compulsively.
Most memorably, I invited him and Irina to my parents’ home in Yonkers for Thanksgiving, making him the only United Nations colleague who ever entered my wild Irish family sanctum. When they arrived, Irina immediately sat down on the carpet and began playing with my children, while Eddie and Vitaly talked Russian history and literature. When we went around the table to describe what we were most thankful for, Vitaly said, “Peace between our two countries. Whatever happens, we must preserve that. It was no fun before.”
I liked and respected Vitaly. But I also spent much of my time at the UN in pitched, public battle with him.
IN LATE 2013, VIKTOR YANUKOVYCH, the Russian-backed president of Ukraine, walked away from a wide-ranging economic and political agreement with the European Union that he had been planning to sign. His about-face prompted protests from hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Moscow had leaned hard on Yanukovych not to sign the deal, and young people who saw their future in Europe took to the streets in significant numbers. They were joined by Ukrainians of all ages who were fed up with pervasive government corruption.34 Together, gathered in Kiev’s Maidan Square, they shouted out “Hid-nist! Hid-nist!”—“Dignity! Dignity!”
As the protests swelled, Ukraine’s security forces began firing on the demonstrators, killing more than one hundred people in January and February of 2014. Eventually, intense pressure from the Ukrainians who had taken to the street, Yanukovych’s political allies, and foreign governments (including EU countries, the United States, and even Russia) convinced the Ukrainian president he needed to contain the unrest. Yanukovych signed an agreement with the opposition for early elections and democratic reforms, but fearing for himself and his hoarded wealth, he then abruptly fled his own country, eventually resurfacing in Russia.
In late February of 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine, seizing the Crimean peninsula. Three months later, it sent its forces into eastern Ukraine, waging full-blown war. Russia’s military takeover of part of its neighbor was a flagrant violation of international law, which prohibits one country from forcibly taking another’s territory. In 1990, when Iraq invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, the Security Council demanded Iraq’s withdrawal and ultimately authorized a multinational military coalition to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty. But now, because Russia was a permanent member of the Security Council, it was able to use its veto to prevent a united international stand against its blatant aggression.
Still, the Council became important. It was there that the United States and other countries fought in the court of public opinion over truth and culpability. Following Russia’s illegal land grab, it became the main venue in which the United States and our allies exposed Russian deceit and emphasized its isolation in the world.
Some of the most storied diplomatic showdowns in the post–World War II era had occurred in the Council, as countries sought to define their positions as indisputable facts. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as television cameras rolled, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson interrogated his Soviet counterpart about whether the USSR had deployed missiles in Cuba. “I am prepared to wait for an answer until Hell freezes over, if that is your decision,” Stevenson said. When the Soviet representative hedged, Stevenson theatrically unveiled images of the missiles at Cuban bases, proving their existence to the world. More notoriously, in 2003, when the Bush administration wanted to convince a skeptical international audience that Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent danger, Secretary of State Colin Powell used the Security Council as the stage on which to make his now-discredited presentation.
More directly applicable to the Ukraine crisis was the 1956 confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over the Soviet attempt to crush Hungary’s democratic uprising. When I had first read about this episode as a college student, I was flabbergasted by the Soviet ambassador’s contradictory and desperate claims in his face-offs with US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. He denied the facts of what the USSR was doing, insisting that Soviet troops were not entering Hungary despite film footage showing they were. He billed Soviet actions as humanitarian, claiming that the United States and its allies had created “a state of terror” inside Hungary and that Soviet forces had intervened to prevent a “fascist dictatorship.” And he pointed the finger at events or sins committed elsewhere, invoking the Suez Crisis in Egypt to muddy the waters about Soviet wrongdoing.
Close to sixty years later, at the initial emergency Security Council session on the Russian land grab in Ukraine, I found myself sitting two seats away from Vitaly, listening as he used identical tactics to deny that the Russian military had invaded Ukraine.
Ignoring the extensive evidence of Russia’s aggression, he claimed that the Russian military was not even in Ukrainian territory. He painted a false picture of neo-Nazis and fascist sympathizers terrorizing Russian speakers. Then, he dramatically held up a letter from Yanukovych, Ukraine’s discredited and absent president. “The lives, security and rights of the people . . . are under threat,” Vitaly read out loud from Yanukovych’s “request” for Russian intervention in words likely scripted by Putin himself. “I therefore call on President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin of Russia to use the armed forces of the Russian Federation to
establish legitimacy, peace, law and order and stability in defense of the people of Ukraine.”
In formulating my response, I had to speak to multiple audiences. In addition to directly confronting the Kremlin, I needed to appeal to other countries to join us in pressuring Russia to reverse its military takeover. I also had to consider the Ukrainian people. Ukraine’s ambassador had informed me before the meeting that millions of Ukrainians would be watching the session on prime-time television, gathering in their homes, in bars, and before storefront windows. I wanted them to know that America stood with them, and to feel the depth of that solidarity.
Additionally, with Fox and CNN carrying my remarks live, I had to bear in mind the American domestic audience, including Republican members of Congress who were portraying our administration as soft on Russian aggression. I had to vent our outrage while also establishing the truth about what was actually taking place in Ukraine.
And I absolutely had to win the argument with Vitaly.
Complicating matters further, Susan had called just before I left my office with instructions not to be “too hot.” The words of the UN Ambassador speaking on behalf of President Obama could inadvertently provoke Putin to launch attacks in other parts of Ukraine. I assured her that I would not overdo it.
I started by laying out the facts about Russia’s actions in painstaking detail. Russian military forces had taken over Ukrainian border posts. They had surrounded Ukrainian military facilities in Crimea. They were blocking cell phone service. Russian ships had moved into the waters off of Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city. Russian fighter jets and helicopters had repeatedly violated Ukrainian airspace, and a number of Russian troop transport planes had landed in Crimea.
After I heard Vitaly speak, I decided to go beyond my prepared remarks to respond extemporaneously to the falsehoods I had just heard.
“Listening to the representative of Russia,” I declared, “one might think that Moscow had just become the rapid response arm of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.”
The Russian takeover was not about self-defense or restoring calm, as Vitaly had alleged. It was a military invasion of territory that the Soviet Union had made part of Ukraine in 1954, but which Putin and many Russian nationalists wanted to be part of Russia.
“Russia has every right to wish that events in Ukraine had turned out differently,” I concluded, “but it does not have the right to express that unhappiness by using military force or by trying to convince the world community that up is down and black is white.”
A few days later, as I walked my kids back from a playground near the UN, several Ukrainians came over to thank me for exposing Russia’s lies. One distraught elderly woman said, “We were afraid we would be alone.”
Afterward, Declan asked me what the women were so upset about, so I told him about Putin, searching for terms a five-year-old could understand. “It’s like someone entering our apartment, taking two of your favorite stuffed animals from your toy corner, and then saying they used to belong to him,” I explained. “How would that feel?”
He looked at me with a pained expression and shook his head incredulously as we resumed our walk home.
ALTHOUGH PUTIN ATTEMPTED to depict the Ukraine conflict as one between the United States and Russia, I tried to focus on the Ukrainian people whom Russia sought to airbrush from history. Having fought for democratic reform, these Ukrainians were now suffering the devastating effects of a conflict that would go on to kill more than 10,000 people and displace two million.
In order to see the impact of the conflict firsthand, I traveled to Ukraine to meet with young reformers who had joined the new government that succeeded Yanukovych’s. I also visited with families who had been forced to flee eastern Ukraine because of the Russian-sponsored violence. One mother told me how her husband and two-year-old child were killed when their home near the town of Debaltseve was shelled during a Russian separatist offensive. She and her five surviving children escaped in a van whose roof and doors had been blasted out by shelling, eventually arriving in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where locals took them in.
And yet Vitaly continued to act as though none of this was happening, giving voice to the deceptions of the Russian government. When I presented the facts, he simply pretended they were not true. “I have the impression that Ms. Power is taking her information from United States television,” he said during one of our confrontations. “Then of course everything in Ukraine must seem just wonderful.”
My speechwriter Nik Steinberg and I tried to use my remarks at each session to convince fence-sitting countries to condemn the Russian government’s actions. Nik had been a student and teaching assistant of mine at the Kennedy School, where he had stood out as a gifted writer. He had gone on to work for Human Rights Watch, documenting disappearances and extrajudicial killings in Mexico. He had never served in government or written a speech before he came to work for me. But when I hired him, he took to it instantly. He anticipated and preemptively rebutted counterarguments. He was prescriptive about what needed to be done and who needed to do it. And he eloquently told the stories of specific individuals whose lives were on the line, something that human rights NGOs excelled at, but which government speeches rarely tried.
Critically, Nik brought an outsider’s perspective. He would interrogate claims made by US officials that did not seem to have strong backing and reject the bureaucratic impulse to soften sharp, potentially arresting arguments. Ever the field researcher, when he wanted to include a personal story in one of my speeches, he would try to obtain additional details from the relevant individuals (or people directly connected with them), regardless of where they were in the world.
Nik also kept his cool when foreign government officials made outrageous claims in his presence. Once, when we met together with a Mexican official who said that most of the victims of Mexican disappearances were criminals, I slipped Nik a note that said, “You must want to throw yourself out the window.” He glanced at it, and then calmly went on to ask a series of questions, exposing the speciousness of the official’s claims.
For important national security remarks, like those I began frequently giving on Ukraine, Nik often had to consider contradictory edits and comments from more than twenty faceless officials within US government ranks. After experiencing this process for the first time, he came into my office looking exhausted.
“Make sure you also run my statement by Susan and John,” I reminded him.
Despite momentarily appearing dazed by my request—as if I was asking that he telephone President Obama for line edits—he quickly recovered, and within the hour had figured out how to get speeches before the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. On fast-breaking, high-stakes issues, we needed to ensure that both were comfortable with what I was going to say on behalf of the United States.
Keeping my remarks current for each Ukraine session demanded that I present evidence of Russian misdeeds in real time. But because the information on which we were relying was highly sensitive, the intelligence community had to continually decide which details it was prepared to declassify for use in my remarks. Sometimes that process broke down or different intelligence agencies disagreed on what should be disclosed. I often found myself beginning a Council session with Nik still on the phone, trying to ascertain whether I had license to expose the details of particular Russian troop or weapons movements.
During one televised meeting, I still had no speech in hand when the Council president turned in my direction and said, “I now give the floor to the representative of the United States.” As my microphone light turned red, signaling my time to begin, I felt my special assistant Colleen breathlessly swoop in behind me. I reached my hand back like the anchor in a relay race awaiting a baton, Colleen handed me a green folder, and I opened it and immediately began to read, feigning calm.
The flurry of Russian provocations, followed by emergency Security Council and high-level Washington meetings on Ukraine, m
eant my kids saw me even less than usual.
One night, arriving home at ten p.m., I did what my dad had done with me in Dublin after returning from Hartigan’s: I roused Declan from bed for some fun.
“Let’s go get a burger,” I said, taking him to The Smith on 2nd Avenue.
Cass was in Cambridge, and I longed to share with someone how I was doing my small part to stand up to Putin, who Declan had asked about regularly since our sidewalk exchange with the Ukrainians. As my son dug into the bacon from his cheeseburger, I regaled him with my best lines from earlier in the day. I proudly recounted how Vitaly had seemed to stumble in our back and forth. And I told Declan that I had made clear that just because Putin had big weapons did not mean he could take what belonged to other people.
“Did it work, Mommy?” he asked innocently, dipping his French fry in mayonnaise.
“Did what work, Dec?” I said.
“Did Putin leave Crimea?” he asked.
I smiled. Declan, in all his wisdom, was focused on the one result that mattered—not who won the public debate, but whether the aggressor had retreated. My son had brought me down to earth.
“Not yet, Dec,” I said. “But a Power never gives up, do we?”
“Never!” he said, his face bright with possibility. “And tomorrow you can try again.”
WHEN RUSSIA ATTEMPTED to formalize its military conquest of the Crimean peninsula, I saw an opportunity to do something concrete.
Russia had announced a plan to stage a referendum for the Crimean people to vote on their future. What the Russians were doing, however, was a sham. Putin only gave Crimeans the choice between joining Russia or becoming independent. He refused to give voters the option of remaining part of Ukraine. Moreover, the atmosphere before the poll was terrifying. Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms and ubiquitous Russian-backed paramilitaries were flaunting their heavy weapons and abducting, beating, and torturing activists, journalists, and minorities.
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