IT WAS 4:46P.M. ON 11 SEPTEMBER 2001 in Moscow when Mohamed Atta flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. In the hours that followed almost three thousand people were killed or fatally injured. It was the most serious terrorist attack in American history. It also marked the start of a new era in international relations. A decade after the collapse of its old foe, the Soviet Union, America had a new enemy: Islamic terrorism.
Vladimir Putin had spent the afternoon in the Kremlin meeting a group of forty-eight Russian journalists and handing out various state honours. In comments broadcast on state television he singled out special praise for those who had reported from Chechnya. The ceremony had just ended when his security summoned him to a conference room, where they were watching television reports of the attacks, which were still unfolding.
‘What can we do to help them now?’ Putin asked Sergei Ivanov, his defence minister and close friend from St Petersburg. ‘What do they need?’1 Ivanov pointed out that the previous day the Russian military had begun exercises in the northern Pacific in which they simulated a Cold War-style nuclear conflict with America. Putin ordered him to call off the exercises: the Americans already had problems enough to cope with.
At the time Flight 11 hit the tower, Bush had been on his way to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida to highlight education reform. He pressed ahead with the event, reading a children’s story, ‘The Pet Goat’, to a class of second-graders, even as Andrew Card, his chief of staff, whispered to him that a second plane, later identified as United Airlines 175, had struck the South Tower. Storming out would ‘scare the children and send ripples of panic throughout the country’, Bush claimed later. He intended instead to ‘project calm’.
Afterwards he went swiftly to the school auditorium, where the audience had come expecting to hear a speech about education. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America,’ Bush told them. ‘Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.’
Bush then rushed to the airport and to Air Force One, which climbed to 45,000ft, well above its usual cruising altitude. Bush called Dick Cheney, his vice president, who was in PEOC, the President’s Emergency Operations Center, an underground bunker beneath the East Wing of the White House, built for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and strong enough to survive a nuclear strike. ‘We’re at war,’ Bush told him.
The president wanted to fly straight back to Washington as soon as possible, but, with reports of other hijacked planes and fears of an attack on the White House, he reluctantly allowed himself to be persuaded by aides to keep away from the capital. Instead, he flew first to Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana, home to the Eighth Air Force, where he recorded a short televised message vowing to ‘hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts’. Then it was on to Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Nebraska, home to Strategic Air Command, where the communications were better and Bush could convene a video conference with the National Security Council. ‘We are at war against terror,’ he told them. ‘From this day forward, this is the new priority of our administration.’ With all civilian air traffic now grounded and the chances of further attacks limited, it was deemed safe for Bush to return to Washington. He touched down at Andrews Air Force Base at 6:44p.m. and boarded Marine One bound for the White House. The helicopter flew an evasive pattern at treetop level, accompanied by two decoy craft.
As soon as Putin learnt of the plane strikes, he tried to telephone Bush, the first world leader to do so. With Bush out of touch in the air, the call was taken by Rice, who was in the PEOC bunker with Cheney. Putin assured her that Russia would not raise its military readiness in response to any moves taken by America following the attacks, as it would have done during the Cold War years.
‘Is there anything else we can do?’ Putin asked Rice. She thanked him and the thought flashed through her head: ‘The Cold War really is over.’2
‘Russia knows directly what terrorism means,’ Putin said later in a televised address. ‘And because of this we, more than anyone, understand the feelings of the American people. In the name of Russia, I want to say to the American people – we are with you.’ Russian television framed its coverage accordingly. Muscovites laid flowers outside the US embassy; the anti-American feeling that had flared after NATO’s attacks on Serbia two years earlier had been replaced by shared sorrow.
The next day, Bush returned Putin’s call. The mood was warm. Putin told him he had signed a decree ordering a minute of silence to show solidarity with America. ‘Good will triumph over evil,’ Putin said, ending the conversation. ‘I want you to know that in this struggle, we will stand together.’3
America had ignored persistent Russian warnings of the dangers of Islamic terrorism – the last of them as recently as 9 September, when Putin telephoned the American president following the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the head of the Afghan Northern Alliance, which was fighting the Taliban government. Putin had been told by Russian intelligence of their fears that the killing of Massoud meant that something much more serious, and longer in preparation, was afoot. He passed this on to Bush but came away concerned that the American leader ‘did not fully grasp the seriousness of the issue’, as Primakov put it.4
‘I didn’t allow myself to say, “We did warn you about this”,’ Putin recalled after the attacks. ‘It wasn’t the moment. I frequently talked about the threat in Afghanistan. I said it’s not only a threat to us because the training camps there are sending terrorists to Chechnya. It threatened the whole world.’5 Putin appeared genuinely to relish the opportunity to help. As it became clear that Bush was preparing a retaliatory strike on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Putin not only offered words of support, he also vowed to provide America with intelligence information collected by Russia about the infrastructure, location and training of Islamic terrorists. After all, they were Russia’s enemies as much as America’s.
Putin was also the key to a greater prize: as part of his plans to strike back at the Taliban, Bush wanted to send ground troops into Afghanistan. To do so he needed logistical cooperation from neighbouring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Bush did not know the leaders of either of the two former Soviet states, but appreciated that Putin held enormous sway over them. On 22 September, Bush called him for help. During a long conversation that Saturday morning, Putin agreed to open his airspace to US military planes and to use his influence with the Uzbek and Tajik presidents to help American troops enter Afghanistan. Bush had worried that the Russian leader would have been opposed, fearing his country would be encircled by US forces. Instead Putin seemed more preoccupied by the threat from terrorism. He even ordered Russian generals to give their American counterparts a briefing on their own experiences in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
It was, Bush recalled, ‘an amazing conversation’. He told the man he now referred to as Vladimir how much he appreciated his willingness to ‘move beyond the suspicions of the past’.6 Before long, Bush had the agreement he needed. On 7 October, the war against the Taliban – ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ – was launched.
Putin’s backing for Bush was dictated in large part by his own struggle at home with the Chechen rebels, whose battle for secession, which had begun in the early 1990s as part of the broader demand for self-determination across the former Soviet Union, had evolved from a secular movement to an increasingly Islamist one. By likening the Chechens to Al Qaeda, the Russian president was able to pose in American eyes as a victim of fundamentalist terrorism rather than as an autocratic leader crushing an oppressed minority. Even before 9/11, Western criticism of Russian brutality in Chechnya had been muted. Now it went even quieter.
Although this may seem like a cynical ploy, there seemed a genuine sense in the Kremlin that the attacks would bring home to America the reality of what Russia had been suffering at the hands of the Chechens. ‘Everybody in the Kremlin thought that now the Americans finally realised what kind of problem this was,’ says Voloshin, who had been in St Petersburg on 11 September and returned to Moscow that evening to find the Kremlin ‘in a state of shock’. ‘When this was our problem, they could not see it. But now they had to realise how horrible this was and that now we would have to remain close.’7
As a result, the Kremlin was pleased to see that Washington was at last moving against various US-based Islamic funds: Russia had long been pressing American authorities to close them down on the grounds that they had links with terrorism and were being used to buy arms for Chechnya, but Washington refused, claiming they were purely humanitarian. Now it took action against them. The move was welcomed in Moscow but was also seen as proof of America’s double standards.
‘After 9/11 we had a hope that now they had to understand us and we had to become partners in a fight against terrorism,’ says Voloshin.8 ‘But then it turned out that the Americans did not need us as partners; they were worried only about their own problems and they did not care about ours. It was a period of some expectations and missed opportunities for cooperation.’
EVIDENCE OF THE NEW SPIRIT CAME that October when Putin announced that Russia would abandon its massive electronic eavesdropping post at Lourdes, Cuba. Some 1,500 Russians were employed at the 28-square-mile complex, listening to phone calls, tracking US naval operations, monitoring launches from Cape Canaveral and providing communications support for spies in North America. Since its inception in 1964, the complex had been a major concern to American intelligence. Putin said he would also begin a long-planned withdrawal from Russia’s other such centre at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. The motivation was largely financial, with the hundreds of millions of dollars a year saved from the closures to be spent on re-equipping the Russian army. Yet the symbolism was clear.
Despite the warming relations with Moscow, the US administration was keen to press ahead with leaving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The aim was to free America from what John Bolton, Bush’s pugnacious new undersecretary of state for arms and international security, called a ‘dangerous relic of the Cold War’.9 During their summit in Slovenia, Bush had warned Putin that he planned to give him the required six months’ notice of America’s withdrawal, leaving both countries able to develop their own anti-missile defences; 9/11 did nothing to change his mind. On 13 December, Bush made his announcement.
Putin reacted calmly to the news: Bush’s decision was mistaken, he argued, but the United States was within its legal rights to take the action and he was not going to use the announcement to encourage ‘anti-American hysteria’ in Russia. For the Kremlin, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the various other arms control agreements concluded during the Cold War retained symbolic importance as a recognition of their status as America’s equal. Dismantling this network of treaties, as the Bush administration seemed determined to do, was an attempt to erode this status. Putin had gone out of his way to help America over 9/11, but Bush did not appear prepared to reciprocate. However warm Putin’s personal relationship with Bush, he could do little to influence his administration. The new era of cooperation clearly had its limits.
Despite such differences, Putin and Bush remained determined to find a way of improving relations. At a summit in Moscow in May 2002, they signed a new arms control deal – the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, or Moscow Treaty) – that committed both countries to reduce their respective arsenals from about 6,000 warheads to no more than 2,200 at the end of 2012. The Bush administration had initially proposed an informal agreement between the two presidents. Putin wanted a formal treaty, however, and Bush acceded to his request. Rice said that the accord should not be considered the first Russian–American treaty of the twenty-first century but ‘the last treaty of the last century’.10 In contrast to the arms control treaties of old, the text ran to just three pages. It was hailed by Bush as paving the way to what he called ‘an entirely new relationship’ with Russia.
Divisions between the two sides persisted, however, especially over the nuclear plant that the Russians were helping the Iranians to build in Bushehr and which America thought could be misused by Tehran to help its clandestine nuclear weapons programme. Bush told reporters that he and Putin ‘spoke very frankly and honestly’ about the need to make sure ‘a non-transparent government run by radical clerics doesn’t get their hands on weapons of mass destruction’. For his part, Putin defended his country’s cooperation with the regime in Tehran, saying it was ‘not of a character that would undermine the process on non-proliferation’.
‘It [Bushehr] was not a threat to anyone, but all our negotiations used to start and finish with this issue,’ said Voloshin. ‘We used to explain to everyone: “Do we look like people who want Iran to have nuclear weapons? Probably not.” We figured out they could not construct a nuclear weapon with the help of this nuclear power plant. We told them [the Americans] this, tried to persuade them, specialists met them, but everything was quite useless.’11 Rightly or wrongly, the Russians believed the Americans were motivated not by security fears but by commercial rivalry. (The Kremlin felt vindicated in this assumption when the plant was finally completed in 2011 and Iran seemed no closer to developing nuclear weapons.)
NATO enlargement was even more divisive. Since his summit with Clinton in June 2000, Putin had continued to send out mixed signals about the Alliance. In July 2001, during his first press conference as president, he had urged that NATO be disbanded, dismissing it as a relic of the Cold War. It would be better to replace it with a new pan-European security organisation, he said. Asked how Russia should react to a further expansion of the Alliance, Putin outlined a number of possible scenarios, one of which was Russian membership. ‘We do not view NATO as a hostile organisation and do not see its existence as a tragedy,’ he said. ‘Although we don’t see the need for it either.’
Putin was not the only one to talk about Russian membership of the Alliance; surprisingly, some members of the incoming Bush administration were also sympathetic to the idea. Russia was already a member of the Partnership for Peace. A review of Russian policy by the state department’s office of policy planning suggested issuing an invitation to Moscow as part of the enlargement process. Richard Haass, the office’s director, saw it as a way for the West to show Russia the respect that it craved.
‘I thought it would take some of the sting out of NATO enlargement and it would remove the argument that the post-war order was somehow built against Russia,’ Haass said more than a decade later. With NATO gradually becoming what he called an ‘à la carte’ organisation, he also did not think it would impair the Alliance’s functioning. The idea did not go any further than Colin Powell, the secretary of state, however. ‘Those who doubted the wisdom of it . . . worried that it would impair the continuing military effectiveness of NATO, that Russia, essentially as an insider, would become obstructive and would work against NATO’s continuing viability,’ recalled Haass.12
That October, in a reflection of the changed international situation since 9/11, Putin again raised the subject of Russian membership of NATO during a private meeting with Robertson at Alliance headquarters in Brussels.
‘Mr Secretary General. When are you going to invite us to join NATO?’ he asked his host.13 Robertson replied that no country was ever ‘invited’ to join the Alliance. They had to apply.
Putin was not impressed. ‘Russia is not going to stand in a queue with other countries that don’t matter,’ he said. Robertson suggested they ‘stop the diplomatic sword dance about membership and build the relationship between us’. ‘And that’s what we did,’ he says. It was the last time Putin spoke about joining NATO.
IT WAS TONY BLAIR WHO CAME up with a way of squaring the circle. His relationship with Putin remained close. Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, recalls how the Russian leader called several times ‘to have chat with Tony’ on how to approach European issues, adding ‘We thought we had created an interesting new relationship with a Russian leader who could be more like a normal leader.’14 As Blair wrote in his memoirs, these contacts helped him to understand. Putin’s determination that Russia should regain something of the role as a great power that the Soviet Union had enjoyed. In November 2001 he proposed a new relationship with NATO intended to reflect and enhance the new spirit of international cooperation brought about by 9/11.
The idea was to create a new body, to become known as the NATO–Russia Council, to replace the NATO–Russia Permanent Joint Council that had been set up in 1997. Despite the similarity between their names, there was a key difference between the two bodies: the old organisation was structured in such a way that Russia could express its opinion only after decisions had been taken by NATO. Its successor would allow Russia to discuss security issues as an equal with the Alliance’s nineteen members before decisions were taken.
NATO foreign ministers agreed to create the council during a meeting with their Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, in Reykjavik in May 2002. Powell claimed the accord would open a new chapter in relations with Russia – and with the other former Soviet states – while preserving the Alliance’s ability to act independently. For Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, it marked the ‘funeral of the Cold War’. He added: ‘With this, Russia comes out of the cold as a partner, ally and friend of NATO.’
The idea may have been Blair’s, but Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, made it his own. In one of the more unlikely political partnerships, Berlusconi had become close to Putin since their first encounter at the G8 summit, which he had hosted in Genoa in July 2001, and tried to take over from Blair to become a kind of self-appointed mediator between the Russian leader and George W. Bush. The two men went on to hold more meetings than any Russian and Italian leaders before them, seeing each other on average twice a year, often in an informal setting: at Berlusconi’s opulent villa in Sardinia or at Putin’s sprawling dacha in the middle of the forest near Davidovo outside Moscow or his home in Sochi. They became close friends: Berlusconi would go each October to Russia for Putin’s birthday party, and Putin would bring his family with him when he visited Sardinia. A large four-poster in Palazzo Grazioli, a grand building in Rome where Berlusconi rented a floor while prime minister, was jokingly known as ‘Putin’s bed’, according to a tape leaked to the Italian media in 2009, although it was not clear why it got its name.
‘Berlusconi believes that Putin, a fellow “tycoon”, trusts Berlusconi more than any other European leader,’ said Ronald Spogli, the US ambassador to Rome, in a cable published by WikiLeaks. ‘Berlusconi admires Putin’s macho, decisive, and authoritarian governing style, which the Italian PM believes matches his own. From the Russian side, it appears that Putin has devoted much energy to developing Berlusconi’s trust.’ The cables also quoted a contact in the Italian leader’s office, who claimed that the two men exchanged lavish gifts and reported suspicions that Berlusconi was ‘profiting personally and handsomely’ from secret energy deals with Putin – a claim the Italian leader denied.
It was during one of their many encounters, in April 2002 in Sochi, that their conversation turned to the new NATO–Russia Council. According to Berlusconi’s biographer, the American journalist Alan Friedman, the Italian leader played up the idea of the new body as a counterbalance to NATO enlargement, and suggested that Italy host a meeting at the end of May at which the treaty could be signed. The two men promptly called Bush, who went for the idea.
Berlusconi, the showman, was delighted at the prospect and set about organising the event as if it were one of the spectaculars for which his television companies were renowned. With security still tight in the aftermath of 9/11 and a guest list that included some of the most powerful people in the world, it was decided that the summit, set for 28 May, should be held not in Rome but instead at the Pratica di Mare airbase south-west of the capital. Ground-to-air missiles were installed to protect the airspace and commercial flights from nearby Fiumicino airport were suspended. The Italian navy cleared a stretch of the Mediterranean coast.
It was on the venue itself that Berlusconi really made his mark: some six thousand workers, toiling for twenty days, built something akin to a giant film set – ‘a sort of Cinecittà for world leaders, made of plywood painted to look like stone and with fake ancient Roman statuary constructed out of fiberglass’,15 as one commentator put it – although the construction was almost destroyed by a massive rainstorm the evening before the summit. The main area where the leaders met and signed the treaty was decorated with arches reminiscent of the Colosseum. Another, likened to an Aztec temple, was used for news conferences, while the fifteen hundred journalists covering the event worked in an area resembling an aircraft hangar decorated with faux travertine marble. Ancient statues were brought in from museums in Rome. Berlusconi’s personal lighting engineer oversaw the installation of a lighting system that could be used to show each leader at his or her best, the way contestants are highlighted in a game show. At the lunch Berlusconi sneakily tried to rearrange the table settings so he could sit next to Putin, until Lord Robertson, the NATO secretary general who was chairing the meeting, spotted what he was doing and told him firmly that they had to stick to alphabetical order.
That small setback apart, Berlusconi’s efforts paid off: the day’s events proceeded in suitably over-the-top fashion, with the final shot capturing the Italian leader, flanked by Bush and Putin, signing the document, while Blair and Chirac looked across the table. The language used at the summit was equally hyperbolic. The joint declaration claimed NATO and Russia were ‘opening a new page in our relations, aimed at enhancing our ability to work together in areas of common interest and to stand together against common threats and risks to our security’.
At a press conference, Putin admitted differences with NATO on ‘certain security questions’ but insisted that ‘what unites us is much stronger and more serious’. The agreement, he said, was a ‘very important step towards the creation of truly partner-like relations between Russia and NATO, based on mutual respect of each other’s interests’. For a long period of time, Russia had been on one side of global issues and ‘practically the rest of the world’ on the other, he said. ‘No good came out of this confrontation between Russia and the rest of the world. And most of the citizens of my country understand this very well. Russia is now returning to the family of civilised nations.’
For his part, Robertson paid ‘a particular tribute to President Vladimir Putin for his vision and courage in breaking the bonds of old policies and all politics’, adding that the agreement ‘shows that cold warriors can become partners in building a better world’. Berlusconi praised Putin’s braveness. ‘Mr Putin is a democrat, a liberal-minded politician, a Western man,’ he said. ‘He will manage to unite the destinies of his country, Europe and the West in the interests of all our countries and the whole of humankind.’ Russia, he added, ‘must join the European Union’.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, left Italy ‘very optimistic, and convinced that we were now entering a new era of cooperation between Russia and our Western organizations, NATO and the European Union’.16 Other leaders shared his belief that a new era was beginning. In a speech in Edinburgh that December, Robertson described the new relationship between Russia and NATO as ‘a revolution’ that marked the end of a dark century for Europe that had begun with the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 and ended with the attacks of 11 September 2001. The agreement signed in Pratica di Mare had ‘changed the world forever’, he declared.17
In a recent interview, Berlusconi looked back with pride on his achievement. ‘I guess of all the things I did in my life, this may be the one I am most proud of,’ he told Friedman, his biographer.18 ‘This really was the moment that marked the end of the Cold War, you know.’ Robertson agrees: ‘There was a pragmatism about Putin,’ he recalls. ‘And I think it was for good calculated reasons. As he said, they had always been isolated and it had done them no good. If they were going to be part and parcel of this great enterprise, then fine. And in all the times I met him that seemed to be the sentiment.’19
Yet rather than marking the beginning of a new start for Russia and the West, the Pratica di Mare meeting looks, in retrospect, more like the high point in relations. Part of the problem was resistance within the US administration to allowing Russia genuinely to become a member of the NATO–Russia Council’s decision-making process. Much was made by NATO of the difference between the old ‘19+1’ set-up and the new arrangement under which Russia would now play a full part in making decisions rather than be presented with a fait accompli. But old attitudes die hard: in reality, NATO members continued to meet among themselves and would agree a common position on issues before they invited in the Russian representatives.
‘There wasn’t any issue, at least initially, that the US government was prepared to put before the NATO–Russia Council where the NATO position had not been worked out beforehand, which in a sense was really contrary to the spirit of the document,’ says former Bush adviser Thomas Graham.20 ‘The Russians will have figured this out very, very quickly. They participated, but it wasn’t really what it appeared to be on the surface.’
The old-style Cold War thinking was not confined to one side, however: according to Graham, when it came to selecting whom to send to Brussels, the Russians chose ‘a bunch of intel types’ who turned their mission to the organisation into a ‘collection platform’ for intelligence and set themselves the goal of ‘burrowing out as many secrets as they could about NATO’. ‘There was deep suspicion on both sides, but that was only natural because we had been enemies just ten years earlier,’ he adds.
Putin appears to look back on the meeting as a lost opportunity. Creation of the NATO–Russia Council ‘was a positive movement towards building a long-term partnership between Russia and NATO’ that ‘created the conditions for long-term cooperation’, he said in an interview more than a decade later. ‘But, unfortunately, we – and I mean everyone, without shifting the blame onto anyone – we failed to take full advantage of the agreement that was reached in Italy. The Russia–NATO agreement itself is certainly a platform for building relations, but changes were needed in practical policies as well and, unfortunately, we have not seen those.’21
One of the greatest stumbling blocks was NATO’s determination to continue its expansion eastward towards the Russian border. Enlargement had become an article of faith for the Alliance, as it was for the European Union, which was also growing. Potential new members, for their part, were clamouring to be admitted. The only question was how many should be let in, and when. The Alliance was again divided, but the roles were reversed: this time Germany and France were cautious and concerned about the Russian reaction – especially to the inclusion of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had been part of the Soviet Union itself rather than merely its satellites. Britain wanted a relatively small expansion. America, backed by the Nordic countries and the three new Central European members admitted in 1999, pushed for a ‘Big Bang’ solution that would redraw NATO’s eastern flank all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
The Russian reaction was predictable: Primakov reiterated Moscow’s objections to a move that ‘brings a military alliance right up to our borders for no real purpose’.22 Yet that, in a sense, was the point. While repeating the mantra that expansion was no threat to anyone, US officials insisted that Russia could not be allowed a right of veto over the Alliance’s membership.
At the Prague summit that November, a formal invitation was issued to Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states. Croatia, next in line, was given its own Membership Action Plan. In a speech on the eve of the summit, Bush insisted, as Clinton had before him, that NATO membership was good not just for the Alliance and those countries that joined it, but for Russia as well because of the stability and security it would provide. ‘Russia does not require a buffer zone of protection,’ he declared. ‘It needs peaceful and prosperous neighbours who are also friends. We need a strong and democratic Russia as our friend and partner to face the next century’s new challenges.’23
Bush flew straight on after the summit to St Petersburg, apparently at Putin’s request. ‘My visit with Vladimir was my first stop after Prague,’ he told reporters as he stood by Putin’s side in the majestic setting of the Catherine Palace. ‘The mood of the NATO countries is this: Russia is our friend. We’ve got a lot of interests together; we must continue our cooperation in the war on terror; and the expansion of NATO should be welcomed by the Russian people.’
Putin seemed as little convinced by such claims as Yeltsin had been. Like Russian leaders before him, he wanted weak, disunited countries along his borders rather than strong, united ones. Only this way could Russia have the strategic depth it needed for its defence. Putin spoke of ‘the problem’ of NATO expansion, saying publicly he did not consider it necessary. Privately, though, there was no repetition of the rancour that had accompanied the first wave of enlargement.24 According to Robertson, the Russian leader appeared to be bowing to the inevitable. ‘I met Vladimir Putin nine or ten times in the lead-up to 2002 and at no point did he raise in a negative way the enlargement of NATO,’ he recalls.25 ‘Not once. I think Putin thought it was going to happen anyway.’
Bush also worked hard to portray America and Russia as allies fighting a common threat. His comments had a special resonance: Russia was still reeling from a brazen siege by Chechen terrorists of the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow a month earlier, which had ended with the death of 128 hostages – most of them from the gas used by commandos during the rescue mission. The Russian authorities were widely criticised for their handling of the attack, but Bush went out of his way to be supportive. He compared the incident with 9/11, saying there was a ‘common thread’ running between them. ‘Any time anybody is willing to take innocent life for a so-called cause, they must be dealt with,’ Bush said.26 ‘People tried to blame Vladimir. They ought to blame the terrorists. They’re the ones who caused the situation, not President Putin.’