Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  ‘Chirac said everything possible to help Putin and not to criticise him, and to help him appear on the world stage as a responsible leader having to deal with enormous stakes – how to catch up from Soviet times and become a modern country,’ says Gourdault-Montagne. ‘Chirac thought there was no evidence for Russia going back to Soviet times. They had jumped into a new world, but it was a long task, and they had to be supported. And it was in the interest of the West to help the Russians as much as possible because we have common interests. Chirac thought the stability of the continent was on the axis of Paris, Berlin and Moscow – hence all these trilateral meetings we had until 2007. It was fascinating to see how the three got on together.’6

  German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the third in the trio, was like most of his compatriots eternally grateful to Russia for withdrawing its troops without fuss from Eastern Germany. As a gesture of goodwill he later wrote off €6 billion of debt that Moscow owed the former German Democratic Republic.

  The relationship, it is true, did not get off to a very good start. During the German election of 1998 Schröder had promised to stop pouring vast amounts of cash into Russia, as his predecessor Helmut Kohl had done. He wanted a pragmatic relationship based on business interests and a certain diplomatic reserve – none of the bear-hugging that Kohl and Yeltsin had indulged in. His foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, almost caused a diplomatic incident during his first meeting with Putin in January 2000 by denouncing his Chechen campaign and demanding an immediate ceasefire. Schröder himself did not shy away from visiting the three Baltic republics (something Kohl had refused to do for fear of offending the Russians) just a week before President Putin’s first visit to Berlin in June 2000.

  But the visit itself changed things dramatically. The two men talked for five hours, without an interpreter, thanks to Putin’s command of German. Despite Tony Blair’s attempts to ‘get in there first’, it was clear that Putin regarded Germany as Russia’s paramount European ally. Schröder himself understood that close collaboration with Russia was the best means to encourage democratisation: ‘Russia has always been successful,’ he wrote, ‘when it has opened itself up to Europe, engaged in a lively exchange and linked itself with the economic and intellectual development in the rest of Europe.’7 The two men initiated something unique among the European nations: the St Petersburg Dialogue, an annual Russian–German event which combined intellectual discussion with intergovernmental talks and intensive business-to-business deal-making. Soon Schröder would be drawn into Putin’s sauna-and-vodka circuit. They became close friends, often visiting each other with their families. Putin would even fly out to the chancellor’s home town of Hanover just to celebrate Schröder’s 60th birthday with him. Putin enabled Schröder to adopt two children from St Petersburg. After leaving office Schröder became chairman of Nord Stream, a Gazprom affiliate that would bring natural gas straight from Russia to Germany (which he had supported as chancellor), and dropped all criticism of Putin’s policies. (Chirac, by contrast, turned down Putin’s offer of a highly paid job with Gazprom.)

  In an interview, Schröder looked back at his relationship with Putin and described him as a ‘man you can trust’. ‘He was open, and in contrast to his image he has a lot of humour. He is very family-oriented, and he doesn’t let down his friends. He’s someone I would be glad to have a beer or glass of wine with even if I didn’t have to deal with him politically.’8 Those were clearly the words of a man who had no intention of disparaging a colleague who was still in office and with whom he maintained close business and personal ties. But that does not make them irrelevant. On the contrary, the close relationship between Putin and Schröder – and between Putin and Chirac – was a major factor in the early 2000s as Russia tried to position itself in the world.

  With the UK balanced somewhere between the ‘European’ view and the American, compromises had to be thrashed out – among them NATO’s two major decisions of 2002. In May the NATO–Russia Council was set up, bringing Russia closer to the club. But six months later, at a historic summit in Prague, NATO invited seven former Soviet satellites to become members of the club. It wasn’t quite what Putin had in mind when demanding to be treated as an equal.

  NATO’s sun shines on eastern Europe

  The lights go down in the seventeenth-century Spanish Hall of Prague castle. On a stage two dancers perform a hilarious piece by a Czech-born choreographer, Jiří Kylián, to music by Mozart. The dancers are dressed (somewhat scantily) in period costume and wigs. In one part of the performance they leap about like fleas, performing crazy mating rites on a huge four-poster bed. But the audience is not composed of President Václav Havel’s bohemian buddies from a Prague theatre: they are the heads of state and 700 guests from NATO’s present and future member states – not all of them expecting such a raunchy curtain-raiser to the alliance’s enlargement process.

  The Prague summit on 21 November 2002 was Havel’s swansong as president of the Czech Republic. The playwright-turned-politician wanted it to be remembered both for its artistic panache and its historic significance. He had spent most of his life as a dissident, stubbornly resisting communist rule and protesting at the Soviet occupation of his country. His own country was already a member of NATO; now he wanted to celebrate the freedom of seven more nations.

  It was hard for the Russians to understand that this really was about celebrating freedom (from communism), not threatening Russia. The foreign ministry spokesman, Alexander Yakovenko, spoke darkly about ‘the appearance of NATO’s military potential at Russia’s borders, just a few dozen kilometres from St Petersburg’.

  The foreign minister himself, Igor Ivanov, put a positive gloss on the event: ‘Moscow no longer considers NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat, since the alliance has undergone a radical transformation since the end of the Cold War and now concentrates on the fight against global terrorism.’ But the Russians did not really understand why enlargement was necessary. It was not just that they believed that Gorbachev had been promised it would not happen. They also could not understand why, if Russia was accepted as a partner, anyone should feel they needed protection from them – and they understood perfectly well that despite all the protestations to the contrary, NATO would defend its new members against Russia if necessary. After the handshake of the NATO–Russia Council, Prague came as a slap in the face.

  What the Russians failed to do was make any connection between their policies and behaviour at home and the way they were perceived abroad. This was a problem I had to grapple with a few years later when I worked as a media adviser for the Kremlin: my clients were unable to grasp that the key to improving their ‘image’ abroad was not better PR but better behaviour. (I will look at this in detail in Chapter 9.) My impression from working closely with them is that they genuinely do not comprehend why many East Europeans – and particularly the Balts – remain deeply uneasy about their big neighbour.

  Naturally no one at the Prague summit spoke openly of their fear of Russia. But you did not have to dig very deep into history to understand its roots. Almost all of the East European leaders attending Václav Havel’s show had personally, like him, lived through the horrors of Soviet occupation and life in a totalitarian regime. There were many open sores. The Poles felt the Russian government had not done enough to acknowledge (far less apologise for) the murder by Stalin’s secret police of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn in 1940. The Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had not just been occupied by the Soviet army but incorporated into the Soviet Union, where they had had to fight for their survival as nations. Thousands of their people had been sent to the Gulag. Their tiny republics had been swamped with Russian citizens, who brought with them their language and culture, and a Moscow-based Communist Party bureaucracy that turned them into second-class citizens. Native Latvians comprised less than half the population of their own capital city, Riga. There was widespread resentment of the Russian presence, and the three Baltic na
tions were the first to rise up against Soviet rule when Gorbachev’s reforms opened the lid a little in the 1980s.

  But their independence, restored in 1991, did not put an end to all the problems. Russia came to terms politically with the situation, but more than a million Russians lived in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Kremlin felt it had a right and duty to protect them. The new independent governments did themselves no favours by not always treating their Russian minorities with much consideration. In their hearts, most Balts felt the Russians should never have been there in the first place: it was they who had colonised the Baltic and subjugated its people, so they had only themselves to blame. Language and citizenship laws which rendered most Russians stateless in Latvia and Estonia were criticised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the European Union demanded changes as a condition for the two countries’ accession. Over the years since independence, Russia had kept up a litany of complaints about civil rights in Latvia and Estonia (Lithuania’s Russian population was much smaller and had few complaints). At times the rhetoric was very hostile, so it should have come as no surprise to the Russians that Baltic nations were welcomed with open arms into NATO.

  By common consent, it was Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, the Latvian president, who stole the show at the Prague summit with a powerful, eloquent speech, delivered without notes. She herself had not personally endured the years of Soviet rule, as she had escaped with her parents at the age of seven, just as the Red Army ‘liberated’ her country and imposed communism there. But her words summed up what the event was all about:

  Latvia lost its independence for a very long time, and it knows the meaning both of liberty and the loss of it. Latvia knows the meaning of security and the loss of it. And this is why being invited in an alliance that will ensure our security is a momentous moment that will be writ large in the history of our nation.

  We in Latvia would like to build our future on the rock of political certainty, not on the shifting sands of indecision. We do not want to be in some sort of grey zone of political uncertainty, we would like to enjoy the full sunshine of the liberties and the rights that NATO has been defending so long. We do not want to be left out in the outer darkness, and we would not wish this to happen to any other nation who has expressed the desire to join those nations that hold the same values, that follow the same ideals, and that are ready for the same efforts and the same strivings. Our people have been tested in the fires of history, they have been tempered in the furnaces of suffering and injustice. They know the meaning and the value of liberty. They know that it is worth every effort to support it, to maintain it, to stand for it and to fight for it.

  Her audience – all male heads of state – almost stopped breathing as she spoke. Alexander Kwaśniewski, the president of Poland, recalled later in an interview: ‘I had tears in my eyes, to tell you the truth. It was one of those touching moments that showed that the Second World War was really over. We were starting a new era. This feeling ... I sensed it through my skin, a shiver through my body. The Second World War was finally over in Prague, in the palace that was previously used for communist meetings, where Václav Havel, now president, was host.’9

  Everyone present felt the same. Except, perhaps, the Russian delegation, which had turned up for a brief, pro forma session of the NATO–Russia Council the next morning. The foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, recalled how he tried to explain to his Western partners that by ensuring their own ‘security’ the new NATO members were making Russia feel less secure: ‘What was the real interest of those states in joining NATO? Yes, there was a political interest, but where was the threat coming from? One should first formulate real threats and then think in what way one can minimise or confront those threats.’ And he added: ‘In reality this does not add to anyone’s security, neither to NATO countries nor to Russia. It adds an element of distrust. You want to think about your own security, but you don’t want to think about the security of Russia.’10

  The Americans had an answer to such complaints. This is Nick Burns:

  You know, by expanding NATO, we were also calling Russia’s bluff. The Russians had been saying, since the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, that they were different, that they also believed that Europe should be a place where people should be free to decide their own futures without fear of external domination. By inviting those seven countries into NATO in November 2002, we were saying: if you choose freedom in a future democracy, we can help to guarantee that and to sustain it. The fact that many Russians subsequently said that this was a treacherous move by NATO, that this was an indication of bad faith by NATO, I think tells you everything you need to know about those Russian leaders – that they didn’t believe in the promise of democracy.

  The Russians don’t, in the modern world, in the post-Soviet world, in the post-1991 world, the Russians don’t have a right to decide other people’s futures. They don’t have a right to impose their empire on other peoples in what they call their near abroad. And if we had the strength, as we did, to see that other peoples could be free and democratic, it was certainly the right thing to do to help them achieve that freedom.11

  The ability of the Russians and Americans to talk at cross purposes was astounding. The Russians could not understand why their own behaviour at home meant that their neighbours continued to fear them. The Americans and their allies could not see that the Russians were upset by being cast in the role of potential aggressor. NATO’s two summits in 2002 were hailed as ending the Cold War. In fact they helped to blow on its embers and start a new one. Seen from Moscow, the old Iron Curtain, running through the centre of Europe, was being replaced with a new one, much closer to home.

  Putin’s tongue lets him down again

  In his state-of-the-nation speech in the spring, President Putin spoke as if he was already where he wanted to be – accepted as a respected voice on the world stage, and virtually claiming joint leadership of the war on terror. ‘Russia is today one of the most reliable guarantors of international stability,’ he said. It was ‘precisely Russia’s principled position’ that had allowed a durable anti-terrorist coalition to be created. By joint efforts, he said, ‘we’ liquidated the most dangerous centre of international terrorism in Afghanistan.

  He then went on to talk of Russia’s ‘numerous concrete steps towards integration with Europe’ and his goal of forming a ‘single economic space’ with the European Union.

  Fine words, but as so often with Vladimir Putin, he then blew it. On a trip to Brussels for a summit meeting with EU leaders in November 2002, he lapsed into the kind of language that labelled him not as a world statesman but as a bar-room thug. At a press conference a French journalist asked him a direct but not particularly offensive question about Chechnya: why was Russia using anti-personnel mines and shells that were killing hundreds of people? And did the president not think that by trying to wipe out terrorism in this way he was wiping out the population of Chechnya?

  Perhaps the poor Le Monde correspondent did not know that this was Putin’s rawest nerve. By merely asking such a question, he was in Putin’s eyes a terrorist sympathiser. ‘If you’re so keen to be an Islamic radical,’ he railed at the journalist, ‘and are happy to be circumcised, then I invite you to Moscow. We are a multi-faith country and have specialists for this. And I’ll recommend they do the operation so thoroughly that you have nothing left to grow back.’

  This happened just one week before the Prague summit – a handy reminder to NATO’s old and new members that Putin, perhaps, was not quite ready to join the civilised world.

  Allies against the Iraq war

  Had President Putin deployed such crude language with regard to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein he might have earned a wry smile and some kudos in Washington. But the growing confrontation with Iraq was to drive another wedge between Russia and America, and demonstrate that, when it came to pursuing its foreign policy goals, Washington scarcely pretended that Russia was a superp
ower that mattered: certainly they would court Putin to try to get his backing, but if they failed it would not hold them back. The Bush administration was no more interested in taking Russia’s advice on Iraq than Clinton had been on Yugoslavia.

  The Iraq crisis had been deepening throughout 2002, as suspicions grew that Saddam Hussein was continuing to produce and store weapons of mass destruction, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions. A new resolution, number 1441, passed on 8 November 2002 after two months of tough negotiations, gave Iraq a ‘final opportunity’ to disarm or face ‘serious consequences’. Weapons inspectors returned to Iraq in late November. Over the coming months they discovered no banned weapons, but Iraq failed to prove they had destroyed stockpiles that had previously been documented. The diplomatic confrontation that now developed centred on two things: whether the weapons inspectors should be given longer to complete their task (as the chief inspector, Hans Blix, wished), and what to do next – given that Resolution 1441 did not authorise the use of force. It pitted the US and the UK, broadly speaking, against Russia, France and Germany. Since Russia and France were permanent members of the Security Council with the power of veto, it was clear that the US and Britain would not be able to push through a second resolution, authorising military action. The Americans disdainfully referred to the Putin–Schröder–Chirac alliance as the ‘axis of weasels’ – an ironic reference to Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ (Iraq, Iran and North Korea). US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld inadvertently alienated France and Germany still further when he referred to them disparagingly as ‘Old Europe’, as opposed to the more obliging ex-communist countries to the east – ‘New Europe’ – which by and large supported the American position.

  Putin was implacably opposed to American plans to invade Iraq, for many reasons. Russia had major business interests there; it worried that oil prices could slump if Iraqi oil flooded the market after the war; it bristled at what it saw as US unilateralism, overriding international decisions; it opposed the hidden agenda of regime change; it felt UN weapons inspectors should be allowed to continue their work searching for weapons of mass destruction; and it wanted to exhaust all of its own diplomatic avenues to persuade Saddam Hussein to back down or resign from office. Putin was fully signed up to the war on terror, but unlike Bush he did not regard Iraq as a state that sponsored terrorism.