Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  Bush is said to have looked at him and said, ‘OK, I see this is really serious for you. Nobody advised me you treat this so seriously.’

  ‘We can’t sleep for thinking about this!’ said Putin.

  ‘Well, as your friend,’ said Bush, ‘I can promise that we’ll look into what you’ve said.’

  But Putin had a new and concrete proposal, designed to trump the American move – while simultaneously calling their bluff on whether the system was really aimed against Iran and not Russia, as Bush claimed. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I spoke to the president of Azerbaijan yesterday. We have a radar station there, in a place called Gabala. I’m willing to offer this to you. It’s closer to Iran. We can have a joint system. You use our radar in Azerbaijan, and there’ll be no need for one in the Czech Republic.’

  Putin had a stick as well as a carrot. Just days before the summit he had hinted darkly that if the Americans deployed their missile interceptors in Eastern Europe then Russia would have to retaliate by re-training Russian missiles on European targets. Now he offered to remove that threat if the Americans rethought their plans: ‘It would allow us to refrain from changing our position and retargeting our missiles. There would be no need to deploy our missile strike system in the immediate vicinity of our European borders, and no need to deploy the US missile strike system in outer space.’

  It was an opportunity the Americans could not ignore: for the first time, Putin was offering to drop his opposition to missile defence, under the condition that Russia would also be involved in it. Bush promised to talk to his military advisers about it.

  But within a month, sensing he had Bush’s ear, Putin was offering more. On 1 July he flew to Kennebunkport in the state of Maine for informal talks at the Bush family home at Walker’s Point, a little peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. He took a speedboat ride with George W. Bush and his father and ate a supper of lobster and swordfish with the family, together with the foreign ministers and national security advisers from each side – Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, and Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Prikhodko. ‘It was a very relaxed setting,’ says Rice. ‘We sat, I’ll never forget, in this lovely chintz-covered living room, with the ocean in the background.’11

  Next day they did a spot of fishing, and Putin pulled out more initiatives. Not only would he offer the Gabala radar in Azerbaijan but he would get it modernised. And then there was a brand-new radar the Russians were about to commission at Armavir in southern Russia. That could also be used. Together they would form a joint early-warning system for common missile defence involving not just the US and Russia but the whole of NATO. The NATO–Russia Council could finally have something concrete to work on. Putin offered to host an ‘information exchange centre’ in Moscow and proposed there could be a similar one in Brussels too. ‘This would be a self-contained system that would work in real time,’ Putin went on. ‘We believe that there would then be no need to install any more facilities in Europe – I mean those facilities proposed for the Czech Republic and the missile base in Poland.’

  Bush wasn’t too sure about the latter point, but the rest of Putin’s proposal made a lot of sense to him – especially as Putin seemed to place these specific missile defence proposals in the context of a whole new strategic alliance. As Sergei Lavrov recalled later: ‘Putin stressed that if we could work together on this, it would, to all intents and purposes, make us allies. The proposal was prompted by a wish to create an absolutely new relationship between us.’

  The talks ended, and the two leaders were about to go outside to brief the press. Stephen Hadley took President Bush aside for a moment: ‘That was a terrific statement, exactly what we’ve been looking for from Putin. Do you think he’d be willing to say that publicly?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s ask him,’ said Bush. He approached the Russian leader and told him he thought it would help accelerate progress between the two countries if he would repeat on camera what he had said privately.12

  Putin was only too happy to oblige. ‘Such cooperation,’ he told the press, ‘would bring about a major change in Russian– American relations regarding security. In fact, this would lead to the gradual development of a strategic partnership in the area of security.’

  So far, so good, but the Americans had yet to see what kind of facility Putin was offering. The neo-cons in the defence establishment were highly sceptical, and saw the move as a ploy to drive a wedge between the US and the Poles and Czechs. Under-secretary of defence Eric Edelman recalls: ‘I was doubtful that this actually indicated a Russian desire to cooperate on missile defence. My view was that a lot of what they were doing was tactically aimed at preventing us moving forward on missile defence by drawing us into unproductive discussions or into other issues.’13

  In September a team of experts led by the director of the Missile Defence Agency, General Patrick O’Reilly, flew out to Azerbaijan to inspect the Gabala radar station. They were not impressed by what turned out to be an ageing Soviet installation. The neo-cons were not unhappy to have their suspicions confirmed. According to Edelman, ‘What [O’Reilly] said was that this was a radar that had some capability. That it could be useful. But that it was also quite old. That it needed major upgrade. And that in order in the future to really play a role it was going to need some considerable expenditure and work.’

  The team concluded that Putin’s offer could help only to monitor the threat of a missile attack. But the American vision was of a system that could defend against it – and for that they would still need other sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.

  The more Russia-friendly axis in the administration accepted this, but did not want to throw away an olive branch they had not even expected to see, after Putin’s Munich speech. Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates met alone in the defence secretary’s office at the Pentagon. Rice recalls: ‘We’re both Russianists, and we said: what we have to do is, we have to break the code somehow, we have to find a way to scratch the itch that the Russians have about being left out of this, about it being in the Czech Republic and Poland, which was obviously a lot of the problem. And are there some things we can do as confidence-building measures?’

  Gates and Rice batted ideas back and forth and eventually came up with an idea that might do the trick. In October they headed out to Moscow for what were dubbed ‘two plus two’ talks – between the foreign and defence ministers on each side: Rice and Gates, plus Lavrov and Serdyukov.

  On the morning of Friday 12 October they drove out to the president’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence, travelling the same road Rice had taken a year earlier for the surprise birthday party that had ended so testily. Putin wanted to see them before the 2+2 talks got going – and he was in much the same mood as a year before. Again he kept the Americans waiting for half an hour, though he had no other meetings. Then, when he assembled the two delegations around the table, with the television cameras running, he launched into a fresh tirade against the American plans: ‘The one point I would like to make is that we hope that you will not push ahead with your prior agreements with Eastern European countries while this complex negotiating process continues. You know, we could decide together to put a missile defence system on the moon some day, but in the meantime, because of your plans, we could lose the chance to achieve something together.’

  According to Gates, Putin questioned whether the Americans really needed a system to defend them from an Iranian attack. ‘He passed me this piece of paper that showed the range arcs of Iranian missiles, and he was basically saying that their Russian intelligence was that the Iranians couldn’t have a missile that could hit Europe for years and years and years. That’s when I said, “You need to get a new intelligence service.” ’14

  News reports at the time quoted Putin’s sarcastic comment about missiles on the moon, and concluded that the talks had failed. But behind the scenes, Gates and Rice made an offer that the Russians liked. It was intended to bridge the divide over whether or not the Iranians posed a threat. La
vrov remembers: ‘They suggested that the US would not activate their missile defence system until we, together with them, established that there was a real threat.’15

  According to Rice, ‘Bob [Gates] said: suppose we dig the holes, but we’ll do a joint threat assessment on Iran, and won’t actually start deploying interceptors until there is some shared understanding of where the Iranians are going.’

  ‘It was going to take some period of years anyway to get these sites operational,’ said Gates, ‘so we could wait for the installation of the interceptors until the Iranians had flight-tested a missile that could hit Europe.’

  The suggestion went down well because it at least delayed things, but it did little to disabuse the Russians of their conviction that they, not Iran, were the Americans’ real target. At this point Gates came up with a proposal which he now admits, with a wry smile, was certainly not agreed with the hawks back home. ‘I thought that there were a lot of things we could offer in the way of transparency, in terms of giving them access. We could even have a more or less permanent Russian presence there, like arms inspectors.’

  Within minutes the idea evolved into an offer to the Russians to have a permanent military presence, 24/7, at the US installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russians were astonished. Their chief negotiator, Anatoly Antonov, recalls: ‘We didn’t actually discuss the technicalities of where they would live and who would pay for them … but it was an interesting idea.’16

  Gates recalls rather ruefully: ‘All these measures that I talked about, I was just making up on the spot. If Condi and I agreed then why not see if we could make some headway with Putin?’

  Lavrov asked the Americans to put it on paper. But when Gates and Rice returned to Washington with their ad hoc proposals, there was, in Gates’ words, ‘consternation’. The ideas had to be assessed by all the relevant administration departments – defence, state, national security – in the so-called ‘interagency process’. It soon became clear that the neo-cons had not the slightest intention of giving the Russians 24/7 access to their most state-of-the-art facilities. They also belatedly consulted the Czechs and Poles, and were given short shrift. As Gates recalls, with smiling understatement: ‘There were several areas in which the interagency process here sanded off some of the sharp edges of the offers and made them less attractive.’

  The offer was put in writing, as requested, but in place of ‘permanent Russian presence’, it suggested that embassy attachés could occasionally visit the Czech and Polish sites. The Russians shook their heads with derision. Lavrov recalled in an interview: ‘We got the paper in November and not one of the proposals was in it.’

  A second 2+2 session was held in March 2008, but it was bad-tempered and unproductive. By now it was clear to the Russians that the Bush administration would not be deflected from their plans. Within a few months Washington signed the agreements it needed with Prague and Warsaw (despite the opposition of public opinion in both countries). Once again, Putin had attempted to force Washington to take Russia’s views into consideration, and failed.

  Paralysis in the Kremlin

  Putin’s increasingly tough line abroad coincided with a time of growing uncertainty at home. Working with the Kremlin, I became aware of something close to paralysis in the president’s team as he plotted his own future during 2007, the last year of his second term. Under the constitution, he could not run for a third consecutive term, and Putin repeatedly stated that he would not change the constitution to serve his own personal ends. There were many in his entourage who urged him to do so – and public-opinion polls suggested it would have been the most popular option – but Putin wanted to find another way to preserve his role.

  It was the dilemma of an autocrat who was determined, at least formally, to abide by the rules. He had no intention of leaving the scene: his statements indicated that he was afraid the course he had set Russia on could still be reversed, that he did not fully trust anyone else to defend that course as he himself would, and that he certainly did not trust ordinary people, through a democratic election, to choose the ‘correct’ path – not even by offering them two ‘approved’ candidates to choose from. Somehow, he needed to manoeuvre a trusted substitute into the driving seat – someone who would both continue his policies and not challenge his position as the ultimate ‘national leader’, running things behind the scenes. The trouble was, Putin himself did not know how to achieve this. Nor did he know for many months who the right substitute might be.

  Not the current prime minister, certainly. Whereas Boris Yeltsin had appointed Putin to that job in 1999 in order to position him to become president, Putin had appointed his most recent prime minister, Mikhail Fradkov, for precisely the opposite reason – to have a grey yes-man with no ambitions at the head of the government.

  There were two front-runners: Dmitry Medvedev had been first deputy prime minister since November 2005 and was seen as a ‘liberal’, with no obvious connections to the siloviki, while Sergei Ivanov, the former spy and defence minister, was promoted to the same rank – first deputy prime minister – on 15 February 2007, prompting speculation that he was a serious rival for the future presidency. I could tell from my dealings with senior officials that no one knew which of them to side with. Both men began forming their own loyal teams, including press secretaries, but the wisest functionaries kept aloof.

  As a result, people at all the top levels of government became immobilised, afraid of taking long-term decisions and unsure which of the possible candidates to support. The hesitation was palpable from the middle of 2007 through to the parliamentary election in December, and even beyond the presidential election on 2 March 2008. For a good year, the strongman’s dilemma left the country weak and irresolute.

  One thing was clear: no ordinary Russian – indeed no one below the top circle of power – would have the slightest say in who Russia’s next president would be. But it would take Putin months to work out how to do it. I am pretty sure he did not have a plan in place at the beginning of the year. It emerged – and evolved – over the months. I often asked my contacts in the Kremlin what was going on, and I am sure they were not dissembling when they told me they had no idea. Even Putin didn’t know.

  The situation gave rise to the rebirth of Kremlinology, long dead since the days when people like me used to pore over photographs of Politburo line-ups on Red Square, or count how many words Pravda dedicated to various up and coming Soviet leaders. It did not escape attention that in January 2007 Medvedev received a warm welcome for a relatively liberal-sounding speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, nor that it was just five days after accompanying Putin to Munich in February that Sergei Ivanov was promoted to the same rank as Medvedev.

  The new Kremlinologists, including those working in the Kremlin itself, fearful for their own futures, avidly debated the merits of the two contenders. Medvedev was seen as perhaps too liberal or weak (though, on the other hand, that might be exactly what Putin was looking for, to project a softer image abroad). Ivanov was a silovik, surely closer to Putin, who had promoted so many spies and military men in the past years … but then again, perhaps he was too strong, too much of his own man, too much of a threat. Might Putin even allow them to stand against each other, representing different facets of the establishment? Or would Putin finally change the rules and run for a third term?

  It was Ivanov who seemed to be being groomed for the top job, shown more often on television, travelling more often with Putin, haranguing the West in Putin-like tones. Opinion polls, to the extent that they could be believed, put Medvedev marginally ahead of him until June, when the ex-spy pulled ahead by about four points.

  Suddenly, on 12 September, Putin pulled off an excruciatingly bad piece of political theatre, in which the prime minister Mikhail Fradkov was shown on television walking into the president’s office and falling – metaphorically and rather clumsily – on his sword. ‘In view of the political processes going on at the moment,’ Fradkov mu
mbled, ‘I want you to have complete freedom in your decisions and appointments. So I want to take the initiative and free up the position of prime minister so that you have a free hand in configuring your cabinet as you see fit.’ That was code for: obviously I am not going to be the next president, so I will resign and let you appoint the person you want. (This was based on the assumption that Putin, like Yeltsin, would appoint his chosen heir as prime minister.)

  ‘I completely agree with you,’ said President Putin, pretending to have had no say in the cabal, and immediately appointed a new prime minister. But it was neither Medvedev nor Ivanov. Instead Putin nominated an old colleague from St Petersburg, Viktor Zubkov. He was as grey and uninspiring as Fradkov, but for most of the Putin presidency he had headed a powerful anti-money-laundering unit, the Financial Monitoring Committee, which made him privy to the financial secrets of the elite. Few people had heard of him, yet within days the 66-year-old declared that he might indeed run for president.

  It wasn’t just outside observers that were shocked. I happened to be with the Valdai group in Moscow that day, and we had an appointment with Ivanov just two hours after he received the news that he was not, after all, heir presumptive. He laughed it off as best he could, but it was clear from his demeanour that the news was as big a shock to him as to everyone else. His soaring career had suddenly belly-flopped. He said Putin had not even discussed the move with him.

  So was Zubkov the next president? Only if Yeltsin’s manoeuvring was seen as a precedent. But Putin was inventing new ways of doing things, and unlike Yeltsin he had no intention of anointing a successor and then obligingly stepping out of politics. Two days later Putin opined that there were ‘at least five’ viable candidates. Kremlinologists assumed he meant Zubkov, Ivanov, Medvedev, and … two others. I understood from a Kremlin source that this was not merely flak thrown up to disorientate the pundits: Putin himself had not yet decided.