by John Kerry
My job that day was to convince the FARC that there was life after revolution and armed violence. But before I could do that, Bernie and I had to rearrange the deck chairs, literally. When we got into the room, we noticed that it was very formal, with big chairs staring at each other across a long table. The setup was all wrong; it would have only created a sense of distance—another barrier to an already complicated conversation. So we started moving the chairs around. When the FARC negotiators arrived, I could tell they were nervous. They read from a prepared statement and then I delivered our message: if they laid down their arms and complied with the peace agreement, the United States would see them as a legitimate actor and there would be a path for them to enter politics. I talked to them about Sinn Féin and Northern Ireland. The meeting injected some confidence into the process at a critical moment. They told me that they were very worried about security. They talked about how in the 1980s, they had laid down their arms, had joined the political party Patriotic Union and were systematically attacked by paramilitary groups. I remember one of them turning to me at the end of the meeting and saying, “Security is not a bodyguard or armored car; what we need is a guarantee against the paramilitaries.”
As with negotiations on Middle East peace, I knew that security was a centerpiece of this effort. Bernie suggested that Santos appoint a special subcommittee to examine this issue from every angle. At one point, there was a big disagreement over the name of the subcommittee: the FARC wanted to call it the “paramilitary subcommittee”; the Colombian government wanted it to focus on “post-conflict violence.” As usual, Bernie helped defuse the situation with a clever insight from history. He told the FARC leaders about how President Kennedy got two telegrams from the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis: one belligerent and one conciliatory. President Kennedy chose to respond to the latter, and the world was safer for it. Bernie urged the FARC to focus on positive developments—the creation of the subcommittee and the fact that Santos wanted to appoint a respected former head of police to chair it—and avoid squabbling over minor details. Ultimately, the FARC agreed.
So we began a period of constant phone diplomacy with Santos and Bernie. Santos announced the peace agreement in August, and I went to Cartagena the next month for the signing ceremony. It was a promising moment. I had good meetings with Santos and the FARC. We all felt the sense that this was a major diplomatic milestone. But before I could measure its significance, I had to meet with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who was also there for the peace signing. To go from a meeting focused on ending Latin America’s longest-running civil war—one ended because a president put his country’s interests first—into the next room to talk with the leader of a country where civil war loomed large, and where failing leadership was taking an entire country into a downward spiral, certainly put things into perspective. It was a powerful reminder that diplomacy requires constant tending and that leadership matters. It was also a harbinger of things to come. The meeting with Maduro ran long and we got stuck in horrendous traffic in the old city in Cartagena. Imagine thirty heads of state trying to depart at the same time. When we finally got to the airport, we found out that our plane had had to park in Barranquilla, a city about eighty miles to the northeast.
We had another hurdle to overcome: a referendum. Under Colombian law, Santos didn’t have to submit the peace agreement to a referendum or to congress. To his credit, he wanted a referendum to build popular support for peace. On October 2, by a narrow margin, Colombians voted no. We went into another round of intense shuttle diplomacy to try to salvage the effort. I was on the phone constantly with Santos and former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, who was strongly opposed to the agreement and whom I’d gotten to know. Uribe and I had a positive history and he knew I cared about his country even if I’d become Santos’s stalwart friend in the peace process. Santos worked with the opposition to update the agreement.
Five days after the failed referendum, the world sent a signal to Colombia that it was invested in keeping the peace process alive: the Nobel Prize was awarded to President Santos.
On November 24, the Colombian congress approved a tweaked agreement.
I learned a lot working on this endeavor. I learned just how essential it is to have leaders willing to put their reputations on the line; little is ever accomplished without that much in the equation. But I was also reminded that you aren’t defeated unless you decide to throw in the towel. Santos could have accepted the referendum’s verdict and given up, and many in other situations—like Brexit—would have advised that he quit and accept the people’s judgment. But he was made of stronger stuff than that. He didn’t surrender. Neither did we. That was the moment when we leaned in the hardest. At the same time, I remembered all the lessons my dad taught me about diplomacy, starting with the biggest of all: listen. If you convey respect for all sides and listen carefully, even—and especially—when you disagree, you can get a lot done. This was particularly true in my discussions with the FARC, who had spent decades fighting for a cause they believed in deeply, resulting in the deaths of thousands. I could have dismissed them. I could have debated the FARC’s concerns. But it wouldn’t have helped. My job was to help both sides stay focused on the achievable, not the past. And both came to appreciate the power of diplomacy in putting an end to war and opening some real avenues for peace.
• • •
“THAT’S WHERE THE snipers were positioned,” said Geoff Pyatt, our Ambassador to Ukraine, pointing to the fog-shrouded vision of the buildings from which the shots came.
Institutskaya Street in Kiev, Ukraine, was still piled with memorial bouquets for the victims, framed photographs of those killed amid the heaps of tires and lumber that had formed makeshift barricades during months of public protests. Barbed wire was everywhere. Bullet holes marked the streetlamps. People hovered beside a barrel with a fire to keep themselves warm.
It was March 2014 and I was in Kiev to show solidarity with the brave people who put their lives on the line to define the future of their country. I announced an initial $16.4 million to help Ukrainians at a moment of difficult transition.
Three months before, peaceful protests took over Kiev’s Maidan Square. Thousands of men and women braved long nights, bitter cold and violent crackdowns by their government. They were fed up with the corruption of their president, Viktor Yanukovych, who profited by keeping Ukraine tethered exclusively to Moscow. Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union. But going back hundreds of years, Ukraine’s eastern borders had long been closely connected to Russia. Russian was spoken in much of eastern Ukraine, throughout the Donbass region. Khrushchev had been born in Crimea. Nevertheless, much of the country felt a closeness to Europe. It was a nation with one foot in the West and another in the East. Yanukovych’s political patrons in the Kremlin counted on him to keep Ukraine aligned with Russia. But Ukrainians were demanding that Yanukovych broaden the country’s engagement with Europe. They urged him to join in trade agreements with the rest of the continent. Yanukovych balked: he signed an exclusive economic relationship with Russia. The popular explosion was immediate. So was Yanukovych’s reaction: his snipers shot at protesters from rooftops, cutting down more than one hundred people. But the people refused to go home. It was a Tahrir Square moment unfolding in Europe. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych fled the country in February for the safety of Russia. Ukraine had just undergone a popular revolution.
That March, I walked into a group of Ukrainians spontaneously gathered in the Maidan Square. I listened to their passionate pleas for the right not to go back to life as it was under Viktor Yanukovych. One man told me that after traveling overseas for the first time in his life, he came back to Kiev determined to live as he had seen other people live. One woman explained how poor they were under Yanukovych, how the rich lived well, how those in power took the money and left everyday workers behind. This was real populism, not the politically contrived variety I’d seen in American campa
ign commercials: it was the impulse of people who wanted a level playing field in life and expected government to be fighting for them.
The people in the Maidan were moving. I was impressed by their courage. They were just like people in so many parts of the world yearning for their rights to be respected and their government to be accountable. As we motorcaded back to the airport, our ambassador pointed out a makeshift memorial on the side of the road where a journalist who dared to criticize Yanukovych was pulled from her car and beaten within an inch of her life. When citizens rummaged through Yanukovych’s opulent homes and offices after he fled, they discovered evidence that he personally gave the orders for that journalist to be taken out. I was reminded how some reporters take many risks just to do their jobs and record the truth.
But I was also reminded how complicated a struggle a young Ukraine would face in the months ahead. What to our eyes was an inspiration, to Vladimir Putin was an insult. Yanukovych was Putin’s “made” guy. He rose to power on the shoals of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” a pro-democracy uprising in 2004. Putin backed him against a pro-Western rival, Viktor Yushchenko, who was not-so-mysteriously poisoned and whose face was brutally transfigured. Yanukovych lost that race but made a comeback as prime minister in 2006 and president in 2010, with the help of American campaign consultant Paul Manafort. Yanukovych grew up in Ukraine’s hardscrabble east. He looks like a heavyweight boxer, replete with a big, burly frame and a violent reputation. He was locked up twice for assault as a kid and came of age in the rough-and-tumble of the industrial heartland. He grew up speaking Russian and got his shot in Russia’s coal-mining industry in eastern Ukraine. Manafort cultivated a rags-to-riches story: Yanukovych—the self-made pol who with a lot of hard work left the coal mines behind him, no mention of his patron in the Kremlin. Manafort burnished Yanukovych’s image as a slick strongman who could restore stability at home and put Ukraine on the map abroad. He airbrushed Yanukovych’s record of corruption, mismanagement and alleged ties to Russia’s KGB. The campaign tactics came from Washington, but the money came from Moscow.
Putin responded to the revolution in Ukraine predictably. He pumped fake news into social media, painting democratic reformers as neo-Nazis. He broadcast propaganda in Russian to try to divide the country. In February 2014, he had ordered Russian troops to invade Crimea, a peninsula in the south of Ukraine. Its largest city, Sevastopol, is the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and many ethnic Russians live in Crimea, giving Putin a ready-made pretext for intervention as well as vital military interests. Once Putin gave the orders, things got ugly fast. Armed militants took over government buildings, wielding Russian weapons and taking the Russian insignia off their uniforms to try to hide in plain sight. By April, Russia and its proxies were conducting attacks across several cities in eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russian leaders were making outrageous claims to justify their actions. It was nearly impossible to believe Russia could argue that forces occupying buildings, armed to the teeth, wearing brand-new matching uniforms and moving in disciplined military formation, were merely local activists seeking to exercise their legitimate rights. The world knew that peaceful protesters didn’t come armed with grenade launchers and automatic weapons, the latest issue from the Russian arsenal, and speaking in dialects that every local knows comes from thousands of miles away.
Putin also unleashed something ugly and destructive in the Donbass: thousands of residential buildings completely destroyed, indiscriminate shelling by separatists hitting hospitals, schools and public areas where civilians wait in line for food and supplies, hundreds of thousands forced to flee, leaving everything behind—if they could even get out. The buses to safety were few and far between, leaving families huddled in the basements of train stations without food, heat or electricity, not knowing when the next vehicle would come or whether they’d be able to get on. It was testament to how much Putin refused to concede Ukraine to its own people.
Russia’s denials and obfuscations were absurd, and everyone knew it. The question was, would the United States and the West stand up to Putin’s aggression? Would we help the Ukrainians help themselves, and could we strike the right balance—pulling a reluctant Europe to help Ukraine, but avoiding a new Cold War confrontation? How could we create both a show of strength and a strength of diplomacy that could de-escalate the trouble in Ukraine and empower Kiev to stand on its own two feet?
We led an international response that included bolstering NATO’s defenses, reassuring allies and imposing sanctions on Russia that targeted its financial and energy sectors. We called them “scalpel sanctions” because they were more precise than ever before. If we hadn’t employed them and ratcheted them up, the Russians could well have ended up in Kiev. The sanctions exacted a heavy toll on Russia’s economy. Investor confidence dwindled. Some $70 billion in capital fled the Russian financial system in the first quarter of 2014, more than all the previous year. Growth estimates for 2014 were revised downward by two to three percentage points. Meanwhile, the Russian Central Bank had to spend more than $20 billion to defend the ruble, eroding Russia’s buffers against external shocks.
At the same time, we needed to improve security conditions and find a political solution to the conflict. We needed to achieve a breakthrough on the diplomatic front. Our initial approach was to let the Germans, French, Ukrainians and Russians take the lead. This approach had its upsides: it put responsibility on Europe to stay united on Ukraine, and it managed the risk of Putin seeing Ukraine even more conspiratorially through the lens of a U.S.-Russia proxy fight. But those talks dragged on for months with little to show for them, in part because the Russians played divide and conquer. We attempted to insert ourselves in the process, but we were shut out by the participants time and again. It was a source of genuine frustration.
During this period of intense diplomatic activity, Ukraine’s democracy was tested over and over again. But what often got lost in the headlines was that Ukraine met those tests. And in fact, it experienced some remarkable democratic successes—from the brave demonstrations in the Maidan to free and fair elections, to the parliament’s passage of a strong budget and promising reform plan.
The Obama administration was focused on stopping the violence in eastern Ukraine. I entered into several rounds of intensive talks with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. I was working closely with our assistant secretary of state for Europe, Victoria Nuland. The Russians knew her as a worthy adversary. Almost everyone who meets Toria is an immediate fan—almost everyone. On my first trip as secretary, after Toria had left her post as the department’s spokesperson but before the president nominated her for the top Europe position, Sergei Lavrov looked at my staff and said to me, “John, I see you’ve finally fired that Toria Nuland.”
I said, “No, I promoted her!”
He laughed. Before her foreign service days, Toria worked for several months in her early twenties on a Soviet fishing trawler in the Pacific. She brushed up on her Russian and learned how to break the ice with a Stoli. While debating the Russians on Ukraine, there would be days she probably would’ve been glad to be back on that boat.
We worked together with Susan Rice and the NSC on a detailed diplomatic off-ramp to offer the Russians to decrease the pressure on Ukraine. We negotiated the details in London and Paris. It soon became clear that Lavrov had no room to cut a deal. Putin held the Ukraine card closely because he felt the issue so personally and so viscerally. The talks stalled, but the work we did on decentralization formed a critical bridge between the Minsk I agreement in September and what became known as the Minsk II agreement the following February. To this day, the Minsk approach remains the best possible way to de-escalate the violence and find a lasting political agreement.
Ultimately, that’s the only way Russia’s standoff with Ukraine can be sustainably resolved. Russia has a simple choice: fully implement Minsk or continue to face economically damaging sanctions. Russia’s leaders know exactly what
is required: withdraw weapons and troops from the Donbass; ensure that all Ukrainian hostages are returned; allow full humanitarian access to occupied territories, which is required by international law and by several United Nations resolutions; support free, fair and internationally monitored elections in the Donbass under Ukrainian law; and restore Ukraine’s control of its side of the international border.
Ukraine’s democratic potential is brighter today than it was several years ago, far brighter even than it was before the brave protests in the Maidan. And with transatlantic support, the next years have all the potential possible for Ukraine to prove reform can triumph over corruption and over even the most determined efforts of Russia to thwart Ukraine’s determination to embrace modernity. But the struggle that’s killed more than six thousand people is not over, not by a long shot. American commitment to lead the West in solidarity with Ukrainians is needed more than ever before.
My time dealing with Putin and Lavrov over Ukraine reminded me just how much America’s relationship with Russia has changed since I was a boy riding my bike into Soviet East Berlin, and how much it hasn’t. Vladimir Putin is a complicated figure. In one meeting he could be a charming interlocutor, opening bottles of wine and offering bowls of caviar. At other moments, he could employ petty tactics: keeping us waiting for hours just to prove the point that we were on his turf. He could be expansive in one meeting, taciturn in the next. He remembers the Soviet Union with great fondness and sentimentality and believes that the world needs a counterbalance to the United States, yet he presides over a country with no modern economy and invests billions in overseas misadventures in Syria and Ukraine rather than investing in a modern economy. He’s a paradox. Putin and Russia were constructive partners on the Iran nuclear negotiations and on Afghanistan among many issues, and yet they were calculated and ruthless on others, from standing with Assad in Syria to assaulting our democracy at home in 2016. It’s a mistake to see Russia through either rose-colored glasses or Cold War lenses. For years, Republican and Democratic presidents alike negotiated with the Soviet Union and found ways to make progress. Reagan called it the Evil Empire even as he found ways to eliminate thousands of nuclear weapons between us. Somehow, even when difficult, we must always preserve room to sit down face-to-face, compartmentalize issues as needed, and make progress where we can, even as we disagree where we must. But we can only do that ready to tell the truth, to call out Russia on their malicious activities, from the assault on our elections to the violation of international law in Ukraine. The United States must always lead the effort to hold them accountable.
