MOSCOW HAD NOT SEEN ANYTHING LIKE it since the end of the Soviet Union. On 9 May 2015, the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany, a dizzying array of Russian weaponry rolled through the centre of the capital in a perfectly choreographed display of military might. Some 16,000 soldiers and 200 armoured vehicles passed through Red Square, among them the much-awaited new T-14 Armata tank. The sky overhead was full of 150 airplanes and helicopters. Later, an ‘immortal regiment’ of 250,000 people marched through the city carrying portraits of relatives who had fought in the Second World War, still known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. They were led by Putin, who carried a picture of his father, also called Vladimir, who was injured by a German grenade. This was not just a commemoration of the proudest day in Russian history. With Putin still riding a wave of patriotism following his annexing of Crimea, it was also an expression of the country’s military might and a warning to those who did not give it the respect it deserved.
The contrast with the sixtieth anniversary could not have been greater. In 2005, Putin had stood proudly alongside the presidents of the United States and France. Ten years on, in a reflection of the strain that the Ukraine crisis had put on relations with the West, pride of place on the reviewing platform was given instead to Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. Nursultan Nazarbayev, his Kazakh counterpart, was the most prominent of several leaders of the former Soviet republics. Alongside them was a veritable rogues’ gallery, whose members included Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Raúl Castro of Cuba. No leader of any major Western country was in attendance.
The roll call of those prepared to stand alongside Putin showed how his place in the world – and in particular his relations with America and Europe – had been transformed over the fifteen years since he had first come to office. The cooperation of the first few years of the new century had been forgotten; the annexation of Crimea had proved to be the final blow to Obama’s reset. The stalemate caused by Russia’s continued involvement in eastern Ukraine had put a definitive end to any further expansion of NATO and had allowed Putin to reassert his right of veto over any change in the ‘near abroad’. Despite the damage done to the Russian economy by sanctions, his position at home seemed secure and his approval ratings were high, thanks in large part to his continued control of the media. Yet Putin’s role on the world stage remained that of a wrecker of the established order rather than as a positive force. The lands controlled by the Kremlin were considerably smaller than those ruled by the Soviet Union. The attempt to position Russia as a socially conservative rival to the liberal democracies of the West had attracted few takers in Europe beyond backers of the fringe parties on the right.
Nor could Putin hope to compensate for his isolation with a pivot to the east. China was ready to be a partner, but not an equal one: while China’s economy continued to grow, Russia’s was stagnating. While China emerged as a global power, Russia found itself reduced to a regional one. Despite public expressions of camaraderie, Xi was very clearly the senior partner in the emerging relationship – a demonstration of quite how far the balance of power had shifted since the days of the Soviet Union. Out of economic necessity, Putin turned to China, offering to sell Beijing the military hardware Russia had once so jealously guarded, and giving China access to its strategic oilfields.
DESPITE THE CONTINUING COOLNESS OF RELATIONS between America and Russia, cooperation was still possible, as was demonstrated in April 2015 when the two countries, together with Britain, China, France and Germany, reached a framework agreement on curbing Iran’s nuclear programme. Moscow had a variety of reasons for going along with the accord: it did not want Tehran to have nuclear weapons any more than America did, and feared that Washington and some of its allies would take military action against Iran if talks failed. There were also potential diplomatic benefits to Russia in stressing to Iran the role it played in getting the sanctions lifted, while making clear to the West that it had supported the drive to prevent the country from becoming a nuclear power. There was the matter, too, of America’s long-running plan to develop a missile defence system in Europe. Washington had always claimed, somewhat improbably, that the system was aimed at ‘rogue states’ (such as Iran) rather than at Russia. By that logic, Lavrov argued, any removal of the Iranian threat would make it more difficult for America to press on with the contested system.
While the Iran deal was the product of long, careful negotiations, Putin also demonstrated that he had not lost his ability to surprise. On 30 September 2015, Russian warplanes laden with bombs took off from the country’s airbase in Latakia, Syria. They began targeting rebel groups opposed to Moscow’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad; among those hit was at least one group that had been trained by the CIA. The significance of the move soon became clear: although still on the back foot over Ukraine, Putin had opened a dramatic new front in his battle with Washington.
Russia’s intervention added a further complication to an already complicated conflict, and in the process exposed America’s failures in the region. Obama had stepped back at the last moment from taking military action against Assad in August 2013 and had made no attempt to change that policy in the two years since, despite continuing evidence of atrocities by Assad’s forces. Instead, America had turned its fire on Isis, which had proclaimed itself a ‘worldwide caliphate’ in June 2014 after seizing territory in both Syria and Iraq. Three months later, announcing a broadening of his campaign against the group, Obama ordered air strikes against the Islamists in Syria in addition to its military operations already under way in Iraq. Yet the West’s preferred outcome, a victory for the ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, seemed no closer to realisation – not least because of the difficulty of identifying anyone that fitted such a description among the shifting mass of opposition groups, many of them with links to the Islamists, let alone then turning them into an organised force with any chance of overthrowing the Syrian leader.
Putin justified Russia’s entry into the conflict by saying it was acting ‘preventatively, to fight and destroy militants and terrorists on the territories that they already occupied, not wait for them to come to our house’. The Americans countered that the Russians’ main target was not the so-called Islamic State, but rather the other opposition groups challenging Assad – including the moderate, pro-Western ones. This, Washington claimed, was demonstrated by the fact that Russia had dropped bombs north of the central city of Homs where there were actually few, if any, Isis militants. ‘By supporting Assad and seemingly taking on everyone who is fighting Assad, you’re taking on the whole rest of the country of Syria,’ said Ashton Carter, the US defence secretary. Russia’s action, he argued, was tantamount to ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’.
The Russian action had been foreshadowed by a rapid build-up at the base over the previous three weeks. Yet it still seemed to have come as a surprise to America. The US state department said it had been given just one hour’s notice of the air strikes, by a Russian diplomat in Baghdad. Russia’s military involvement also added a new, powerful but unpredictable combatant to an already crowded field of operations, raising the prospect of possible accidental clashes between US and Russian aircraft. More bombing also looked certain to increase the flow of refugees within Syria and towards Europe, escalating what was already becoming a serious crisis for the EU, whose members were divided over how to cope with the unprecedented influx of more than a million people in the matter of a few months. Was that part of Putin’s plan? It would be difficult to prove, but by this point, anything that weakened European unity served Russia’s geopolitical interest.
Russian media responded swiftly to the new reality, switching their focus away from chronicling the evils of the Ukrainian ‘fascists’ to targeting the Islamists. This time they were also free to highlight the heroism of Russian forces, who in Syria, unlike in Ukraine, were fighting an open war. The conflict provided the Kremlin with an opportunity as well to show off its military capabilities, most dramatically on 7 October when two dozen cruise missiles fired from four Russian warships in the Caspian Sea flew more than a thousand miles over Iran and Iraq before striking targets in Syria. This demonstration of shock and awe, Russian-style, seemed dictated less by military considerations than by a desire to impress the world – and the audience back home. Russian television viewers were treated to movie-like images of jets bombing targets, palls of smoke rising in their wake. The propaganda push extended even to the weather forecast on Russian television, with one forecaster telling viewers about the suitability of the climatic conditions in Syria for air strikes. Domestic support for the offensive surged from 14% to 72% within a few weeks, according to polling by the respected Levada Center.
Western leaders and commentators were quick to predict disaster for Russia, drawing comparisons with the Soviet Union’s involvement in Afghanistan three decades earlier. The doom-mongers’ claims appeared to gain credence from the downing on 31 October of a Metrojet Airbus 320 carrying Russian holidaymakers home from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, with the loss of 224 lives, in what Isis claimed was payback for Russia’s involvement in Syria. Yet such criticisms proved misplaced: Putin’s main aim – preventing the collapse of the Syrian regime – was relatively easy to bring about through judicious application of Russian air power. It also seemed more achievable than the West’s rather nebulous policy, which was based on trying to identify and support ‘good’ rebels while keeping arms away from ‘bad’ ones.
On 14 March 2016 Putin announced that he was withdrawing the main part of Russia’s forces, claiming the twenty-two-week intervention had achieved nearly all of his objectives. Shortly afterwards, a number of Russia’s fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters pulled out – as abruptly as they had arrived. The tide had been turned: Assad, whose future just a few months earlier had looked uncertain, was now back in control of a substantial part of Syria.
Putin marked the withdrawal with a flourish: in May, a month after Isis forces were driven from the ancient city of Palmyra, musicians from St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre staged a surprise concert in the amphitheatre. The orchestra was conducted by Valery Gergiev, a close associate of Putin, who described the concert as a protest against the barbarism and violence of the Isis militants who had used the amphitheatre for executions. Among the performers was another of the president’s friends, the cellist Sergei Roldugin, who had just been linked by documents from the Panama Papers leak to a number of offshore companies with cash flows of up to $2 billion.* Putin himself did not make the trip to Syria, but instead addressed the audience by video link from his dacha in Sochi.
Few members of the audience, a mixture of military personnel and locals, looked much like classical music fans. Yet the event was not so much for them as for the world. It was reminiscent of a previous Mariinsky performance, also conducted by Gergiev, in August 2008 in front of the bombed-out parliament of the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia after Russia’s defeat of the Georgian army. The reminder to the world of Russian military prowess was timed to coincide with the annual 9 May Victory Day celebrations due to take place a few days later.
As ever with Putin, though, all was not quite as it seemed: despite the announced pull-out, a steady flow of Russian supply vessels continued to visit the naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartous. An investigation by the Reuters news agency published just over two weeks later found that Russia had shipped more equipment and supplies to Syria since announcing its intention to leave than it had brought back.1 It also appeared to have reinforced its fleet in the Mediterranean and now had more warships near the Syrian coast than at the time of Putin’s declaration.
Then, in September 2016, Russian forces joined their Syrian allies in a ferocious aerial bombardment of the rebel-held eastern part of Aleppo, a city of 2.5 million before the outbreak of the civil war. The sheer scale of the suffering inflicted on the people of Aleppo, all too visible in video footage, provoked revulsion across the world. Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the UN, accused Russia of ‘barbarism’. Boris Johnson, the newly appointed British foreign secretary, demanded it be investigated for war crimes – a call dismissed by the Russian defence ministry as ‘Russophobic hysteria’. Johnson also took the unusual move of urging people to demonstrate outside the Russian embassy in London. The Russian embassy responded by tweeting a photograph of a single demonstrator.
But Britain was not proposing intervention to stop the assault on Aleppo. Nor was anyone else – America included, despite official leaks that the White House was considering retaliatory cruise missile strikes on Syrian military airstrips. Western attention was focused on Iraq and the battle to drive Isis from its stronghold in Mosul, which began in October, while America itself was in the final throes of an election campaign. By helping Assad to regain Aleppo, Putin was hoping to present Obama’s successor with facts on the ground. Yet there were signs that Putin, emboldened by a string of military successes, might be preparing to go further: what began as a mission to save Assad could be turning into a campaign to help him win back his entire country.
Putin also had a broader lesson for the world. By showing his ability to turn the tide of the war in Syria, he had made it clear that there could be no solution to the Syrian crisis – or, indeed, other crises, current and future, in the Middle East – without the Kremlin’s approval. Putin had demonstrated to the world that Russia was too important to be ostracised.
WHILE ALL EYES WERE TURNED TO Putin’s intervention in Syria, the situation in Ukraine, which had done most to bring relations between Russia and the West towards breaking point, remained grim. In the east of the country, low-level fighting continued. The unfortunate residents of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk remained trapped in a frozen conflict. In Crimea, meanwhile, authorities were accused by human rights groups of curbing free speech, freedom of association and the media, and of failing properly to investigate beatings, disappearances and extrajudicial killings of Crimean Tatar and pro-Ukrainian activists.
The summer of 2016 brought an increase in violence in eastern Ukraine and reports of clashes on Crimea’s border with Ukraine, blamed by the Kremlin on incursions by Ukrainian special forces intent on sabotage – one of whom confessed to his crimes in an interrogation shown on television, looking bruised and battered. Ukraine said he was an innocent truck driver who was kidnapped by Russian forces. As tensions rose, the Kremlin announced that it had begun to deploy its advanced S-400 air defence missile system to the peninsula.
Ukraine was not developing in the way hoped for by those in the Maidan or their backers in the West. The Kremlin’s concern about the uprising that had swept away Yanukovych had been driven in part by fears about the example it might set for Russia. If Ukraine developed into a Western-style democracy with a successful economy, it would represent a dangerous model of the bright new future that might await Russians if they toppled their own leader.
Fortunately for Putin there seemed little chance of that happening. After their first two years in power, Ukraine’s new leaders were still struggling to get to grips with the most damaging problem that had bedevilled the country since independence: corruption. Despite repeated entreaties from the United States and the International Monetary Fund, President Poroshenko seemed unable – or unwilling – to clean up. ‘They are like bad students, always saying, “Professor, just wait until Monday; I will do better”,’ was how Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kiev School of Economics, described Ukraine’s leadership to the New York Times.2 ‘Nothing changed. The same elites are there. The same oligarchs.’
Aivaras Abromavičius, who stepped down as Ukraine’s minister of economy and trade that February after just fourteen months, paints a depressing picture of the country. For Abromavičius, the main problem is the failure of Ukraine’s new leadership to ensure the rule of law. ‘It is very clear that both the past prime minister [Arseniy Yatsenyuk] and current president [Poroshenko] have some people in the inner circle that have a very questionable past and present,’ he says.3 ‘Their practices raise eyebrows and this is a disappointment, of course. Reforms can only be as progressive as the people carrying them out. You can’t surround yourself with the wrong type of personnel or this is the type of result you are going to get.’
In the view of Abromavičius, continued corruption has made it impossible to revive the economy, which is the ultimate key to ending the country’s enforced division. ‘The grand plan was that the economic situation in Ukraine would recover beyond recognition so that those people in the temporarily occupied territories say “we want to live in Ukraine” and we get them back not by military means but by economic and diplomatic means,’ he said. At the time of writing, this plan does not look close to being realised.
Abromavičius’s concerns were highlighted by Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian leader, who after a spell of self-imposed exile in New York had moved to Ukraine in May 2015 when Poroshenko, an old friend from Kiev University, made him governor of the Odessa region. Saakashvili set himself the task of rooting out the city’s legendary corruption, but in November 2016 he resigned, accusing the central government of obstructing his efforts and launching a blistering attack on Poroshenko.
Following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, attention turned naturally to NATO’s north-eastern flank. The United States repeatedly vowed to defend Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which, as members of the Alliance, came under its security umbrella in a way that Ukraine did not. Obama underlined this in a speech in September 2014 in Tallinn. ‘We’ll be here for Estonia,’ he declared. ‘We will be here for Latvia. We will be here for Lithuania. You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again.’
This was easier said than done: the Baltic states, along with NATO’s other new Eastern members, were in a potentially vulnerable position. The Alliance had hitherto refrained from making serious permanent force deployments on their territory, to avoid accusations that it was breaking the spirit of the 1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act, under which it had pledged to rely on reinforcements rather than the ‘additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces’ – taken by Moscow as a pledge not to establish bases there. Yet this risked putting the Alliance in an impossible position: obliged under Article 5 of its founding treaty to regard an attack on any one of its members as an attack on all of them, but without the forces in place to deter or repel such an attack. This, in turn, could undermine the fundamental principles according to which NATO operates.
The three Baltic states look especially exposed. The extent of their vulnerability was underlined by an analysis from the army research division of America’s RAND Corporation, published in February 2016. Using war-game scenarios played out by serving and former military officers, it estimated that if the Russians invaded, it would take them a maximum of just sixty hours to reach the capitals of Estonia or Latvia. ‘The games’ findings are unambiguous,’ it concluded. ‘As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members.’
The Alliance, the report argued, would be left with ‘a limited number of options, all bad’: faced with superior Russian forces, NATO commanders would either have to launch a belated and costly counter-attack, which could lead to nuclear escalation, or accept defeat with ‘predictably disastrous consequences for the alliance and, not incidentally, the people of the Baltics’. Tensions were further raised by a series of Russian exercises near the border, held at short notice, and by the irresponsible behaviour of Russian aircraft, which routinely flew in busy airspace above the Baltic states with their transponders (identification beacons) turned off. During a short visit to Finland that July, Putin told reporters he had accepted a proposal by his Finnish counterpart, Sauli Niinistö, to make sure his planes started to use their transponders. Although ostensibly a gesture of reconciliation, it also implied that Russia expected the stand-offs to continue and, as had been the case back in the Cold War, was looking to establish the rules of the game to increase predictability.
Against the backdrop of such concerns, NATO was drawing up plans for four thousand troops to be based in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in what was described as ‘enhanced forward presence’. Although far too small to hold back a concerted attack from Russia, they would act as a tripwire or, as one senior military official memorably put it, a ‘tethered goat’. Attack them and the full force of NATO would come crashing down on Russia. NATO denied this contravened either the letter or the spirit of the 1997 NATO–Russia Founding agreement, which explicitly spoke of actions the Alliance would take ‘in the current and foreseeable security environment’. The environment had changed dramatically in the intervening two decades, largely as a result of Russian aggression, it was argued, making such commitments no longer binding.
Yet there was also the danger that any increase in NATO forces would exacerbate the very threat it was intended to combat. No explanation was offered as to why Russia would want to invade one or more of the Baltic states, beyond claims that Putin desired to provoke the West for the sake of it, or that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine had revealed it as an aggressive power intent on reclaiming its lost lands. Yet that would be to misunderstand the reason for Putin’s seizure of Crimea and subsequent intervention in eastern Ukraine. Rather than the first staging post in a carefully thought-out plan to reconstitute the Soviet Union, his action appears instead to have been instigated by the fear that a country he and many other Russians still considered part of their homeland was in danger of drifting into the Western camp. He was also counting on a warm reception from the locals and gambled, rightly, that the West would do nothing to stop him.
The Baltic states, small and considered even during Soviet times as somewhat separate, were a different matter. While Putin would undoubtedly enjoy the spectacle of Western disarray that an attack would cause, the prize was considerably smaller and the stakes much higher in the case of an attack on a NATO country. Furthermore, in all three countries he would face hostility not just from the indigenous population but also from a substantial slice of the Russian speakers. If Russia were really set on taking more territory, why had it not simply continued its westward expansion in Ukraine?
Little attempt was made to address such considerations, with politicians and senior military figures on both sides of the Atlantic vying ahead of the NATO summit to talk up the Russian threat. One of the more dramatic interventions came from General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former deputy supreme allied commander in Europe, who in May 2016 published a book entitled 2017 War With Russia: An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command. The book – written in the form of a thriller featuring, as one critic put it, a ‘Blofeld-like Vladimir Putin character’ – takes as its starting point a Russian attack on the Baltic states, and a limp NATO response. Shirreff’s decision to write it was significant insofar as it appeared to reflect concern within the top echelons of the British military over the effects of spending cuts on its capability. ‘The political and military decisions we are currently making, and have already made, are now propelling us into a future war with Russia,’ he argued.
The European Union, meanwhile, was grappling with more pressing problems of its own following the referendum on 23 June in which Britons narrowly voted to leave the bloc – plunging both Britain and the EU into turmoil. During the referendum campaign, the majority of world leaders had made clear their preference for a ‘yes’ vote; chief among them was Obama, who warned that if Britain went it alone, it would be obliged to ‘go to the back of the queue’ when it came to concluding a future trade deal with America. As part of what was derided by critics as ‘Project Fear’, Remain campaigners also argued that leaving the EU would risk playing into Putin’s hands by weakening the union and depriving it of one of the toughest voices against Russian aggression. Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, told MPs a Brexit vote would be ‘absolutely applauded in Moscow’.
Putin dismissed such claims as ‘an inappropriate attempt to influence public opinion’ and continued to refuse to comment after the ‘No’ side won the vote. Others in Russia were less cautious: Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said he expected that the departure of Britain, traditionally one of the most hawkish EU members when it came to Russia, would lead to a more conciliatory line over sanctions. McFaul, the former US ambassador, described the result in a tweet as ‘a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives’.
Brexit also looked set to embolden Eurosceptic parties such as France’s National Front, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland and the Freedom Parties of the Netherlands and Finland, which combined antipathy towards the European Union with varying degrees of sympathy towards Russia. Elections due in the Netherlands, France and Germany during 2017 looked set to hand these parties substantial gains.
In the longer term, some in Russia argued that the vote would lead to a broader geopolitical realignment, with Britain moving closer to America, leaving the remaining twenty-seven EU members to seek a new, warmer relationship with Russia. ‘The most important long-term consequence of all this is that the exit will take Europe away from the Anglo-Saxons, that is, from the US,’ wrote Boris Titov, Russia’s business ombudsman, on Facebook.4 ‘This is not the independence of Britain from Europe, but the independence of Europe from the USA.’ Such thinking seemed all too reminiscent of Orwell’s division of the world, in his novel 1984, into Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania, with Britain reduced to the latter’s Airstrip One.
In the meantime, there was the more immediate problem of what to do about European sanctions against Russia, which were due to expire at the end of July. The bloc’s twenty-eight leaders unanimously agreed to extend them for another six months, yet this looked like it could be for the last time: although the Baltic nations, Poland and Britain stood firm, the policy was criticised by the leaders of Italy, Slovakia, Greece and Hungary, while the French parliament was one of several to call for a change in tack. There were signs of disquiet, too, in Germany: while Merkel remained a resolute backer of sanctions, the Social Democratic Party, the junior member of her ruling coalition, wanted a change of course, with one of its leading members, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister, calling for the sanctions to be restructured to push Russia and Ukraine towards reconciliation. He also denounced what he called NATO’s ‘sabre-rattling and warmongering’, saying it would only fuel tensions with Moscow. ‘Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the Alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken,’ Steinmeier said in a newspaper interview.
It was against this backdrop that the leaders of the NATO countries gathered on 8 July for their summit in Warsaw. The meeting was held in the green Column Room of the Presidential Palace – the place where, in 1955, the Soviet Union and its seven satellite nations signed the Warsaw Pact. The choice of location underlined the massive asymmetry that now existed between Russia and the West. All seven of Moscow’s former satellites, along with the three formerly Soviet Baltic republics, had since become members of NATO. The economic and military balance was tilted to a far greater extent than before against a diminished Russia and in favour of an enlarged West that now stretched to Russia’s border.
The summit’s most important decision, the dispatching of four thousand Alliance troops to Poland and the three Baltic states, had been widely trailed. An American-backed missile defence system for Europe was declared operational, and NATO members vowed to increase air and sea patrols to strengthen commitments to defend the Alliance’s frontiers. Leaders also agreed to increase cyberwarfare capabilities after Russian attacks against Estonia and elsewhere.
They stood firm on Ukraine, reiterating their refusal to recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea and insisting that Russia must withdraw its troops and return the Ukrainian–Russian border to Kiev’s control. They also approved a comprehensive assistance package aimed at making Ukraine’s defence and security institutions more effective, efficient and accountable. But, unlike in 2008, there was no talk of a Membership Action Plan that would have put Ukraine on a clear path towards joining NATO. It was instead offering a vaguer-sounding ‘comprehensive action plan’ that President Poroshenko said would lead to his country becoming an ‘enhanced opportunity partner’.
Such reticence on NATO’s part was understandable given the division among member states – a point highlighted in somewhat undiplomatic terms during the summit by Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to Washington, in a series of tweets. ‘The role of NATO is to provide security to its members. Any enlargement should improve it, not weaken it,’ he tweeted. ‘NATO insists that candidates should solve their territorial conflicts before joining. No interest to “import” conflicts.’ Lest his point was still not clear, Araud added: ‘By admitting a new member already involved in a conflict, NATO would be obliged to assist this country against its adversary.’
Russia reacted with predictable hostility to the decisions taken at the summit, underlying the extent to which the two sides were now openly treating each other as ‘adversaries’ after years of growing tension. NATO was ‘focusing its efforts on the containment of a non-existent threat from the east’, argued Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry’s feisty spokeswoman, who said that implementation of the anti-missile plans were designed to ‘change the existing balance of power’ and would cause long-term negative damage to the entire Euro-Atlantic security system.
Mikhail Gorbachev, now in his eighties, also intervened, accusing the Alliance of planning ‘offensive operations’ against Russia. ‘NATO has begun preparations for escalating from the Cold War into a hot one,’ he said. ‘All the rhetoric in Warsaw just yells of a desire almost to declare war on Russia. They only talk about defence, but actually they are preparing for offensive operations.’
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* Roldugin insisted the money was a series of donations from rich businesspeople in order to purchase expensive musical instruments for young Russians.