The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  I huddled with the lawyers and regional experts at the US Mission, and we came up with a practical plan to preserve Ukraine’s legal claim to Crimea. Prevented by Russia from mobilizing international action through the Security Council, we decided to run a resolution in the General Assembly that rejected the upcoming referendum and the redrawing of Ukraine’s borders.

  Many votes in the General Assembly were purely symbolic. But, in this case, if we could win the vote, Russia would at least not be able to alter the boundaries on official maps.35 No matter what “facts” Russian forces created with tanks and terror, Crimea would remain legally part of Ukraine. This was an unconventional approach, and we would need the majority of the other 192 UN members to get on board, but it was the best way we could use the UN to enshrine Ukraine’s right to recover its own occupied territory.

  We fanned out, as only America’s diplomats can. My deputy, Rosemary DiCarlo, a thirty-year veteran of the Foreign Service and a fluent Russian speaker, drew on her contacts around the world to get US ambassadors to take the issue directly to heads of state, while I tapped the relationships I had forged through my courtesy calls. “Every small country in the world needs the protection of the UN Charter,” I argued. “Think of what it would mean if international borders suddenly became optional. Think what the world would become if your neighbor got to unilaterally decide that a peninsula in your country should become part of theirs.”

  Nonetheless, on the day of the vote, I was worried. I knew that Russia’s closest allies would take its side, and we presumed that many countries would abstain in order to avoid angering Putin. We had also heard from several developing countries that Russian diplomats were offering cash in return for their support.

  In the General Assembly, each country’s representative presses a button and his or her vote instantaneously appears on a digital jumbo screen beside the country’s name: green for YES, red for NO, and yellow for ABSTAIN. The green YES votes of the United States and Ukraine—voting for the resolution and rejecting the validity of the referendum—were among the first to appear. Russia was naturally first among the NO votes. Other countries seemed to be taking their time, and my heart beat wildly in suspense.

  One by one, the votes appeared. In the upper right of the screen, I saw a flash of green, followed by another flash of green in the lower left, then another in the upper left. For thirty seconds, flash after flash came up green. So many of the countries that had been undecided—that had privately confessed their fear that Russia would retaliate against them if they sided with the United States and Ukraine—came through.

  The final vote on whether to reject Russia’s referendum proved a rout: 100 YES votes with the United States and Ukraine, just 11 NO votes, and 58 ABSTENTIONS.* The Associated Press described the result as “a sweeping rebuke of Moscow.”

  This success did not mean I could answer Declan’s question in the affirmative. Putin had not left Crimea, and he was unlikely to do so. In fact, despite having denied his forces were there, the Russian president soon signed a treaty annexing the peninsula.36 But at least the UN maps would continue to depict Crimea as part of Ukraine.

  That was not a lot in light of the gravity of the harm inflicted, but it was not nothing. Putin would not be able to erase his crime, and Ukrainians would know that most of the world supported them.

  After the vote, I spoke directly to Russia—and Vitaly: “You do not get to choose your own facts and your own law. The law tells us your actions are unlawful. The facts tell us you are taking territory from a sovereign neighbor. And the vote here tells us all you are alone.”*

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, on July 17th, 2014, Russian-backed rebels who had seized parts of eastern Ukraine fired a surface-to-air missile that hit a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet, flight MH17. The plane was making its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in an established flight corridor 33,000 feet above Ukraine. The strike incinerated all 298 people aboard.

  We again convened an emergency session of the Security Council. Before anybody spoke, all fifteen ambassadors stood for a moment of silence. The losses were heartbreaking. Joep Lange, a Dutch scientist and a giant in the field of AIDS research, had been traveling with several colleagues on their way to an AIDS conference. One couple had been on a family vacation in Europe with their three kids—ages twelve, ten, and eight—and had decided to stay on for a few days while the children and their grandfather returned home on the flight. Overall, eighty children had been killed.

  Thinking about the passengers, I snuck a glance at Vitaly and found myself wishing there was a bottom to the depths he would stoop to defend Russia. But I did not expect this to be the day he broke ranks. He would do his job as he understood it.

  Since having Declan and Rían, I had noticed that I risked losing my composure whenever I tried to speak publicly about harm done to children. I learned that I could improve my chances of holding it together by reading a speech out loud multiple times before I gave it publicly, allowing me to spin a web of distance and separate my heart from its content. If I had time to read a speech five times before delivering it, that web would be five times as thick as if I read it once; if I managed to read a speech a dozen times, I could almost guarantee that I would get through the remarks, no matter the subject. But in the case of flight MH17, I had not had time to fully inoculate myself.

  “As we stared at the passenger lists yesterday,” I began, “we saw next to three of the passengers’ names a capital ‘I.’ As we now know, that letter ‘I’ stands for ‘infant.’ ”

  As my voice cracked, I paused. I had the sudden impulse to leave the chamber, sprint a block, barge into Rían’s preschool class, and hug her and never let her go. Instead, I glared at Vitaly and found a way to keep going, locating an emotion I could rarely find: rage.

  The facts were obscene. Proud of having acquired a powerful new weapons system, Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine had posted to social media sites numerous videos that showed them moving around the very SA-11 surface-to-air missile system that we assessed had shot down the plane. The separatist leaders, initially thinking they had hit a Ukrainian jet, had even boasted about the strike online, saying, “We have warned everyone not to fly in our skies.”

  In the days ahead, Russian separatists casually wandered through the wreckage, trampling on human remains and carting away evidence. In videos, they could be seen tossing around children’s toys and rummaging through luggage. They also removed from the crash site the missile parts they feared would incriminate them.

  The Russian government, of course, simply denied any involvement, rejecting evidence that the missile system came from the Russian military.* Meanwhile, the Russian disinformation apparatus, which had been distorting events in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine from the start, went into overdrive. Russian news and internet sources simultaneously pushed stories blaming the crash on the Ukrainian military (for mistakenly believing the aircraft was Putin’s and trying to assassinate him) and the CIA. One macabre theory held that the plane had been surreptitiously filled with dead bodies prior to taking off.

  The Russian government weaponized social media, using trolls and bots to bring these wild-eyed conspiracy theories into wider circulation. One year later, a poll would find that only 3 percent of Russians believed Russian separatists were the perpetrators of the attack, while more than 60 percent thought the Ukrainians or Americans bore responsibility. The Russian lies even made their way to the American mainstream when, in October of 2015, CNN asked presidential candidate Donald Trump who was behind the missile strike. Trump repeated Putin’s denials of Russian involvement, adding, “to be honest with you, you’ll probably never know for sure.”

  Russia’s success in obscuring its crime likely encouraged Moscow to think bigger.

  — 33 —

  Us and Them

  By sheer coincidence, several of my Security Council appearances coincided with President Obama’s public statements on Ukraine. The visual of me speaking out against Russian
action in the presence of the Russian ambassador naturally carried with it the drama of an in-person altercation. Obama, conversely, tended to deliver his statements at a podium in more sterile settings. My rejoinders were often spontaneous because I was reacting to Vitaly’s claims in the moment. Obama’s were prepared well in advance and read from a script.

  Had the President resorted to fiery language like mine, he would have seemed unpresidential. Nonetheless, the press decided to play up the contrast, and President Obama’s critics began using me to attack my boss.

  A number of networks juxtaposed clips of Obama and me speaking on Ukraine, in an effort to show that the President’s heart was not in his condemnations. Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and national security analyst on Fox News, told Sean Hannity, “I heard Samantha Power, who seems to be the only real man in the administration.”

  “She served up red meat,” Peters said, while Obama “served up lukewarm waffles.”

  On Meet the Press, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell contended, “They had the same intelligence, the same evidence. Samantha Power was a more forceful presentation at the United Nations than the President.”

  In the Washington Post, columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized Obama’s “rote, impassive voice” when talking about Ukraine, claiming that it “borders on disassociation,” while “Samantha Power delivers an impassioned denunciation of Russia.”

  Two colleagues of mine at the NSC sent me back-channel messages that the President’s senior staff wished I would “dial it back.” Although such criticism now seems thoroughly inconsequential, at the time I found it dismaying. I almost never second-guessed myself when I was in a high-stakes negotiation with Vitaly or when I was challenging him extemporaneously in the Council. And even when I visited dangerous conflict zones, I felt completely in my element. Yet the politics of politics, the internal sniping that occurred within the government, still rattled me, as if I were back in Obama’s Senate office. I never found a way to fully slay those bats.

  I reached out to Ben, who had written the statements for which Obama was being faulted. He reassured me, saying that he had seen the President shut down those who were complaining.

  “Why the hell do you think I put Samantha up there?” Ben reported Obama saying. “She is doing exactly what she should be doing.”

  That same calm spirit in our President that some found frustrating served to protect me at times when others became petty. I could imagine Obama saying, “Our problem, last I checked, is not our outspoken UN ambassador. It is Putin. Can we kindly focus on what we are going to do about that?”

  AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS FREQUENTLY MANUFACTURE and demonize “enemies” to shore up support from their political base. Vladimir Putin was no exception. Since returning to the presidency in 2012, he had signed a law designating NGOs in Russia as “foreign agents” to be monitored. He had expelled USAID from the country (falsely claiming it was interfering in elections), ending two decades of work that had delivered more than $2.5 billion in funding for programs on such issues as education, the environment, and strengthening democratic institutions. Seeking to portray himself as the keeper of “traditional” values, Putin also took aim at LGBT people in Russia, championing laws that criminalized supporting LGBT rights and that banned same-sex couples from adopting children. With the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi about to begin, Putin had claimed he would welcome gay spectators to his country, before adding, “Just leave kids alone, please.”

  Not content to simply persecute gay people in Russia, Putin insisted that his representatives take action at the UN as well.

  In 2014, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had decided to use his narrow administrative authority to do something bold for LGBT UN staff. Ban granted the spouses of all UN employees in same-sex marriages the same benefits as their heterosexual counterparts. The secretary-general’s administrative order was less important for its practical impact, which was small, than for the important message it sent about equality.

  This was precisely the message to which Russia objected. Vitaly called me a few days before Christmas. “We are taking this to a vote in the General Assembly,” he said. “It cannot stand.”

  I doubted that LGBT people suffering persecution around the world would have heard about the UN’s inclusive new policy. But if Russia succeeded in repealing it, I could already see the international headlines—UN VOTES TO STRIP GAY PEOPLE OF BENEFITS.

  Although I told Vitaly that we would fight and win, I was bluffing. Given that homophobic policies were widespread among governments represented in the UN, I did not see how we could rally the votes to defeat the Russian repeal effort. Russia started with support from the fifty-seven countries in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, as well as those in the then-fifty-four-nation African Union. We could count on the governments of Europe, and we would look to Latin America, which had become remarkably progressive on LGBT rights, to give us a chance at leveling the playing field.

  After hanging up with Vitaly, I walked out of my office to tell my schedulers that I would not be doing last-minute Christmas shopping for my kids that evening after all. We were in for a fight and needed to mobilize quickly.

  Hillary Schrenell, my friend and senior adviser, and Kelly Razzouk, a career civil servant who was a lead US negotiator on many human rights issues, became co-captains of our new campaign. Hillary was the person at the US Mission who knew me best, so she started analyzing my relationships with various ambassadors to pinpoint where we might find opportunities to flip a vote. I then began calling foreign diplomats to gauge their support. Kelly and Hillary, who listened in on the calls, kept a spreadsheet to mark down what was said and by whom, tracking every relevant word my interlocutor offered to explain how his or her country was planning to vote. These details allowed us to strategize what arguments would be most convincing in our follow-up calls.

  The four deputy US ambassadors at the UN also threw themselves into lobbying for votes. One of them was David Pressman, whom I had recruited to the US Mission from Washington. When he took up his position in 2014, David had become the first openly gay American ambassador at the UN. The five of us divided up the world map and, with Megan and others in the front office helping, tried to reach every persuadable ambassador before they returned to their home countries for the holidays. Isobel Coleman, the ambassador for UN management and reform, had only just been confirmed by the Senate, but she threw herself into the task of cold-calling diplomats she had never met to try to earn their support. Michele Sison had taken Rosemary’s place as the senior-most deputy, and, having been US Ambassador in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, and UAE, she had a vast web of connections to draw on at the UN and abroad.

  As was typical, most countries we pushed on the issue hoped it would disappear so they could escape the vote. We made clear that ignoring Russia’s anti-gay campaign was not an option the United States was willing to consider.

  “This is not going away,” I told my foreign colleagues. “If you don’t like that it is happening, take that up with President Putin. But we need your support.”

  We practically begged those ambassadors who were LGBT friendly to cancel their vacations to attend the vote, which we expected the Russians to spring on us between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. Separately, we also asked US ambassadors posted in key swing countries like South Africa, Rwanda, and Vietnam to convey to the leaders of these countries how much their vote would matter to the United States. US ambassadors overseas knew the White House was fully behind our initiative, so they picked up the phone or requested urgent, high-level meetings. As a result, we were able to apply pressure both on UN ambassadors in New York and on their bosses back home.

  Diplomats at the US Mission followed my lead and expressed supreme confidence to their Russian counterparts about our ability to marshal significant support. In the face of our bluff, Russia grew unsure of the solidness of its coalition and decided to postpone the vote. A Russian diplomat explained his government’s thinking in an
email that accidentally got forwarded to us:

  We were very upset how the group was outwitted by the USA . . . Now we think the numbers will be worse . . . It will be much worse . . . It is better to have good preparation for March.

  —Russia

  I enlarged the text of the email and printed it on glossy paper, inscribing notes of thanks to all the US officials who had sacrificed precious family time around the holidays to thwart Russia’s designs.

  Unfortunately, when bigotry is part of the equation, people rarely give up without a fight.

  As they had promised, Russia’s diplomats rededicated themselves to overturning the UN’s benefits for same-sex partners. And in response, the US Mission team again fanned out, cornering our foreign counterparts in the various chambers of the UN and phone-canvassing them until they gave a firm answer as to how they planned to vote.

  If a country told us they would abstain, we urged them to find a way to vote no on Russia’s resolution. If they said they supported Russia’s repeal because it was the “African position,” we pointed to South Africa’s progressive Constitution, which explicitly recognizes LGBT people as a protected class. “There is no African position,” we argued. African countries could abstain without departing from unanimity, we assured them.

  As I looked for any angle to pull countries to our side, some calls produced distasteful exchanges. “I know you believe homosexuality is immoral,” I heard myself saying. “This is not about that. This is about a Russian campaign to narrow the administrative authority of the secretary-general.”