VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS never been at a loss for tactical surprises, and he didn’t disappoint this time. Sitting in a hotel near Red Square, we waited for the Kremlin to summon us. Well acquainted with Putin’s penchant for one-upmanship, Secretary of State Condi Rice was relaxed and a little bemused as the first hour of delay stretched into a second. Her staff circled nervously, staring at their watches. The secretary was a pro, watching a Russian sports channel on television as she waited for Putin’s inevitable trick play. It finally came as we approached the third hour. We got the call, but Putin was no longer at the Kremlin. We’d have to travel forty minutes to his compound at Barvikha, on the outskirts of the city. Diplomatic Security didn’t like these kinds of surprises, but they had no choice. Rice shrugged. “Shall we?”
When we arrived, a presidential assistant escorted us to a lavishly appointed dining room. Arrayed around the long rectangular table, with Putin at its center, was nearly the entirety of Russia’s Security Council. With a sardonic half-smile, Putin said he thought Rice, as a student of Russian history, would appreciate the setting. This was the modern Politburo, the court of the new Russian tsar. The point was as subtle as Putin himself: Russia was back.
Putin greeted the secretary and explained that the occasion for the celebration was the birthdays of Igor Ivanov, the sixty-one-year-old Security Council secretary and former foreign minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, the forty-one-year-old first deputy prime minister. It was a jovial meal, punctuated by frequent vodka toasts and liberal resort to Ivanov’s supply of special reserve Georgian wine. Russia had recently embargoed a variety of Georgian products, but Ivanov, whose mother still lived in Tbilisi, evidently had a dispensation from the tsar.
Sitting across from Putin, Rice held her own. Putin played the instigator, poking and prodding about the war in Iraq, the prisoners in Guantanamo, and other unpleasant topics. Sergey Ivanov, the urbane defense minister, piled on at one point with a few acerbic comments about Ukraine, where the afterglow of the Orange Revolution in 2004 was quickly fading. “How’s your beacon of democracy looking now?” he asked.
After dinner, Putin invited Secretary Rice to a separate sitting room. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and I joined them in front of a roaring fire. Putin and Rice got straight to business. Rice raised a couple of concerns about the ongoing negotiations over Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Putin showed off his mastery of the dreary details of poultry imports and food safety standards, but seemed bored by it all. His mood changed abruptly when the secretary raised Georgia, cautioning the Russians to avoid escalation of frictions with President Mikheil Saakashvili over the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Standing up in front of the fireplace, Putin wagged his index finger and grew testy. “If Saakashvili uses force in South Ossetia, which we are convinced he is preparing to do, that would be a grave mistake, and the Georgian people would suffer the most. If he wants war, he will get it.”
Rice stood at this point too, giving no ground to Putin and looming several inches taller than him in her heels. She repeated the risks for U.S.-Russian relations if there was conflict in Georgia. Having to look up at Rice hardly improved Putin’s attitude. “Saakashvili is nothing more than a puppet of the United States,” he said. “You need to pull back the strings before there’s trouble.” Gesturing toward the dining room next door, he added, “I’m going to tell you something that no one in there knows yet. If Georgia causes bloodshed in Ossetia, I will have no alternative to recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and responding with force.” The conversation gradually deescalated, and Putin and Rice sat back down. Putin was exasperated, but concluded calmly, “We could talk for ages about this, but that’s the point I want you to understand. If Saakashvili starts something, we will finish it.”1
Having made his point, Putin excused himself to say good night to the birthday celebrants. He passed the baton to Sergey Ivanov, who reinforced Putin’s message on Georgia. It hardly needed reinforcing. Putin’s pugnacity left an impression. This was not the Russia I had left a decade earlier, flat on its back and in strategic retreat. Surfing on historically high oil prices and nursing fifteen years of grievances, convinced that the United States had taken advantage of Russia’s moment of historical weakness and was bent on keeping it down, Putin was determined to show that he was making Russia great again and we better get used to it.
SERVING AS U.S. ambassador in Moscow was my dream job. Russia can be a hard place, especially for American diplomats, but the relationship between Russia and the United States mattered as few others did. Still struggling with its post-Soviet identity crisis, and a considerably less potent player on the international stage than the Soviet Union had been, Russia remained a force to be reckoned with. Its nuclear capacity was formidable. Its hydrocarbons were a significant factor in the global economy. Its geographic sprawl and history gave it influence across a range of international issues. Its diplomatic skill and permanent membership on the UN Security Council meant that it would have a say.
Having lived through Russia’s complicated post-Soviet transition, I was fascinated by the great historical canvas on which Russians were now trying to paint their future. Often as preoccupied with their sense of exceptionalism as Americans were, they sought a distinctive political and economic system, which would safeguard the individual freedoms and economic possibilities denied them under Communism, and ensure them a place among the handful of world powers. I liked Russians, respected their culture, enjoyed their language, and was endlessly fascinated by the tangled history of U.S.-Russian diplomacy.
Following in the footsteps of Kennan and Bohlen, and the remarkable ambassadors who succeeded them, was a daunting challenge. It almost didn’t happen. Late in my tenure as assistant secretary for near eastern affairs, Colin Powell had asked what I hoped to do next. I told him that I’d love to go back to Moscow, and he said he’d do everything he could to make that happen. He and Rich Armitage recommended me to the White House as the career Foreign Service candidate. There was precedent for noncareer appointees to Moscow, but they were the exception, and there didn’t appear to be any such contenders as the transition to President Bush’s second term unfolded in the winter of 2004–5. Nevertheless, several months passed without any decision, and I began to wonder about my chances, especially given all the reservations that my colleagues and I had expressed in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
In January, shortly after succeeding Powell as secretary of state, Rice approached me about serving as ambassador to Israel instead, making a strong case that she intended to make a priority of the Arab-Israeli peace process during her tenure. I was intrigued, but burned out on Middle East issues after four long years in NEA, and not enthusiastic about relitigating many of the same policy disagreements with many of the same personalities. I decided to push hard for Moscow, and Rice agreed to back Powell’s recommendation. Eventually, the White House approved my nomination in the spring of 2005. I was confirmed by the Senate in July, and Lisa and the girls and I arrived in Moscow in early August.
Spaso House, named after the quiet little square on which it sits in central Moscow, was the immense neoclassical residence of the American ambassador and our new home. We often reminded our daughters not to get too used to its proportions or grandeur. The house we owned in Washington could easily fit into Spaso’s Great Hall. The massive chandelier hanging from the two-story-high ceiling, with its dozens of crystals weighing twenty-five pounds apiece, left us in chronic fear that a guest would be impaled and U.S.-Russian relations imperiled. Beyond the Great Hall was the State Dining Room, with a table that seemed as long as a bowling lane, and, past that, a huge ballroom. A long gallery ran around the second floor of the house overlooking the Great Hall, with a series of bedrooms with twenty-foot ceilings, and a small family kitchen and dining room. In the basement, there was a much bigger kitchen and a labyrinth of storerooms, staff quarters, and mysterious passageways.
I never tired of legendary Spaso stories. One party in 1935, on the eve of the great purge trials, attracted most of the Soviet leadership save for Stalin. Few of the senior officials on the guest list that evening survived. Featuring a variety of acts from the Moscow circus, the party became the model for the famous ball scene in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The best act was accidental—when a trainer put a rubber nipple on a champagne bottle and fed a baby bear liberally, with predictably chaotic consequences. In the early 1950s, Kennan amused himself during his brief and lonely tenure as ambassador by reading Russian poetry aloud late at night in the darkened Great Hall. He assumed that his habit would only confuse his Soviet minders, who were of course recording virtually everything that was said in Spaso. Little had changed on the surveillance front by the time we arrived, and Lisa and I always assumed that the only way to have a private conversation in Spaso was to either go for a walk in the garden or turn on the radio to mask our voices.
We had a busy residence during those three years, welcoming tens of thousands of guests. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other cabinet officers came to private lunches. We hosted three thousand Russians for the Fourth of July. During the two hundredth anniversary of U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations in 2007, we held a series of events, including jazz concerts, films, lectures, and even a fashion show with Ralph Lauren. We celebrated space cooperation with astronauts and cosmonauts. I especially enjoyed sports diplomacy—bringing the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, the Davis Cup tennis team, and the U.S. men’s junior hockey team to Spaso and Russia. We even hosted Lizzy’s senior prom, which conveniently allowed me—and my security detail—to keep her date within our sights for the duration of the evening. Lisa and I worked hard to include people from across generations and Russian society, from prominent Kremlin officials to political oppositionists and human rights activists. Barely a day went by without some event or reception. Spaso House was a huge asset, and we put it to full use.
The embassy itself was now operating out of the new chancery building, which had stood empty and forlorn during our previous tour, and whose top floors were now secure enough for classified work. The staff was still one of the largest in the world, with nearly 1,800 employees, including about 450 Americans, divided across Moscow and our consulates in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Vladivostok.
With an exceptional team behind me and a fair amount of leeway from Washington, I threw myself into my new role. Real progress would be hard to come by. The Russia policy knot mostly just seemed to get tighter, with Washington increasingly preoccupied with troubles in the Middle East, and Moscow consumed by its grievances and captivated by its newfound ability to do something about them.
WHEN I LEFT Moscow after my first tour in 1996, I was worried about the resurgence of a Russia at once cocky, cranky, aggrieved, and insecure. I had no idea it would happen so quickly, or that Vladimir Putin would emerge over the next decade as the extreme embodiment of that peculiarly Russian combination of qualities.
Neither process moved in a straight line. Boris Yeltsin had stumbled repeatedly in his second term, lurching from a desperate financial crisis in 1998 to another war in Chechnya and diplomatic embarrassment in Kosovo. Late in his term, with his health failing, and anxious to protect his family and legacy, he anointed his successor, a man who had in the span of a few years vaulted from gray anonymity in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office to a senior position in the Kremlin, leadership of the FSB, and finally the prime ministry. Putin had an unremarkable career in the KGB, but a string of St. Petersburg patrons helped him up the ladder, and he eventually earned Yeltsin’s trust. He seemed in many ways the anti-Yeltsin—half a generation younger, sober, ruthlessly competent, hardworking, and hard-faced, he offered promise for Russians tired of Yeltsin-era chaos and disorder.
Putin’s most striking characteristic was his passion for control—founded on an abiding distrust of most of those around him, whether in the Russian elite or among foreign leaders. Some of that had to do with his professional training; some had to do with his tough upbringing in postwar Leningrad. The only surviving child of parents scarred by the brutalities of World War II—his father badly wounded in the defense of Leningrad, his mother nearly dying of starvation during the siege—Putin shaped his worldview in urban schoolyards, where, as he put it, “the weak get beat.” He learned to fend for himself, mastering judo and its techniques for gaining leverage against stronger opponents. However indifferent his record had been in university and the KGB, he didn’t lack self-confidence. Nor did he doubt his capacity for reading his opponents and exploiting their vulnerabilities. He could charm as well as bully, and he was always coldly calculating.
The Russia that he inherited was full of troubles. In addition to the apparent political challenges that came with a crumbling state, the economy had descended into turmoil. After the August 1998 economic crisis, in which the stock market crashed, the government defaulted, and the ruble collapsed, unemployment and inflation soared, GDP contracted by nearly 5 percent, and oil production dropped to half its Soviet-era high. A rapid rise in hydrocarbon prices and aggressive economic reforms helped turn the Russian economy around during Putin’s first term as president. By the summer of 2005, early in his second term, Russia’s annual growth rate was averaging 7 percent, and unemployment had dropped by nearly half. Economic progress fueled Putin’s popularity and gave him space to impose his brand of political order. He tamed the oligarchs by brokering an implicit deal—if they stayed out of his business, he’d stay out of theirs. If they waded into politics, he’d wade into their pockets. He made a brutal object lesson of the billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, seizing his oil and gas company, Yukos, and sending him to prison. Others, like Boris Berezovsky, his former patron, were hounded into exile.
Putin’s obsession with order and control, and restoring the power of the Russian state, was abundantly clear and widely popular. His formula was straightforward: Revive the state and its authority over politics, media, and civil society; regain control over Russia’s natural resources to fuel economic growth; and reverse nearly two decades of strategic retreat, rebuild Russian prerogatives as a great power, and reassert Russia’s entitlement to a sphere of influence in its own neighborhood. As I put it in a cable to Secretary Rice early in my tenure, “Uncomfortable personally with political competition and openness, [Putin] has never been a democratizer.”2
Putin’s view of relations with the United States was infused with suspicion, but early on he tested with President Bush a form of partnership suited to his view of Russia’s interests. He was the first foreign leader to call Bush after 9/11, and saw an opening through which Russia could become a partner in the Global War on Terrorism. He thought the war on terror would give Russia a better frame in which to operate than the “new world order” that had dominated U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War. The implicit terms of the deal Putin sought included a common front against terrorism, with Russia backing the United States against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Washington backing Moscow’s tough tactics against Chechen rebels. Moreover, the United States would grant Russia special influence in the former Soviet Union, with no encroachment by NATO beyond the Baltics, and no interference in Russia’s domestic politics. Putin quickly set out to show that he could deliver on his end of the presumed bargain. In the face of considerable misgivings from his own military and security services, he facilitated U.S. military access and transit to Afghanistan through the Central Asian states.
As Putin quickly learned, however, this kind of transaction was never in the cards. He fundamentally misread American interests and politics. From Washington’s view, there was no desire—and no reason—to trade anything for Russian partnership against al-Qaeda. We didn’t have to purchase Russian acquiescence in something that was so much in its own interest, and we certainly didn’t need to discard long-standing bipartisan priorities and partnerships in Europe to buy Putin’s favor. He also misread American behavior, tending to see contrary American actions as part of some careful, duplicitous conspiracy to undermine him, not as the product of an administration that was desperately consumed with its response to 9/11, indifferent to Putin’s calculus, and generally disinclined to concede or pay much attention to a power in strategic decline.
Putin gave us more credit than we deserved for careful plotting against Russian interests. For Putin, the September 2004 Beslan school siege was a turning point. The whole world saw live the massacre of more than three hundred teachers, staff, and students. Putin saw Bush’s response, which included warnings against overreaction and a dalliance with “moderate” Chechen elements to try to defuse tensions, as nothing short of a betrayal. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine that same year, and the Rose Revolution in Georgia before that, led Putin to conclude that the Americans were not only undercutting Russia’s interest in its sphere of influence, but might eventually aim the same kind of color revolution at his regime. These disappointments were piled on top of his anger over the Iraq War, a symbol of America’s predilection for unilateral action in a unipolar world, and President Bush’s second inaugural address and its “freedom agenda”—which Putin believed included Russia near the top of the administration’s “to-do” list. Democracy promotion, in his eyes, was a Trojan horse designed to further American geopolitical interests at Russia’s expense, and ultimately to erode his grip on power in Russia itself.
By the summer of 2005, mutual disillusionment weighed heavily on attitudes in Moscow and Washington. The Bush administration saw a Russia uninterested in democratic values, unlikely to evolve anytime soon into a deferential member of an American-led international club or become a reliable junior partner in fighting terrorism. Putin had already begun to tilt in a more adversarial direction, increasingly persuaded that an American-led international order was constraining Russia’s legitimate interests, and that chipping away at that order was the key to preserving and enlarging space for Russian influence. He also believed that he had a reasonably strong hand to play, with unprecedented domestic approval and support. “Outside Russia’s borders,” I argued in a cable, “Putin sees considerable room for maneuver in a world of multiple power centers, with the U.S. bogged down with difficulties, China and India on the rise in ways which pose no immediate threat to Russia, and the EU consumed with internal concerns. After years of being the potted plant of Great Power diplomacy, Putin, and many in the Russian elite, find it very satisfying to play a distinctive and assertive role.”3
The diplomatic challenge was foreboding, and the stakes enormous. From the outset of my tenure as ambassador, I urged realism about the unlikely prospects for broad partnership with Putin’s Russia, and pragmatism in our strategy. Realism demanded that we come to terms with the fact that relations were going to be uneasy, at best, for some time to come. We should shed the illusions that had lingered since the end of the Cold War, recognize that we were bound to have significant differences with a resurgent Russia, and seek a durable mix of competition and cooperation in our relationship. Pragmatism required that we draw clear lines around our vital interests, pick our fights on other issues carefully, manage inevitable problems with a cool head, and not lose sight of those issues on which we could still find common ground.
Putin understood as well as anyone that Russia had more than its share of vulnerabilities and blind spots, from demographic decline, to worsening corruption, to seething troubles in the North Caucasus. He was not inclined, however, to use Russia’s moment of oil-driven prosperity to diversify and innovate, and unleash Russia’s human capital. The risk to political order and control was too great. I was pessimistic that his outlook would change. As I wrote in an early cable to Washington:
Over the next few years, at least, it’s hard to see any fundamental rethinking of priorities on the part of Putin or his likely successors….Some might argue that this suggests a “paradigm lost,” a sense that a partnership that once was firmly rooted is now gone. The truth is that the roots for a genuine strategic partnership have always been pretty shallow—whether in the era of euphoric expectations after the end of the Cold War, or in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into “a Europe whole and free.” Neither we nor the Europeans have ever really viewed Russia as “one of us”—and when Russians talk about “nashi” (“ours”) these days, they’re not talking about a grand Euro-Atlantic community.
So where does that leave us? Basically, we’re facing a Russia that’s too big a player on too many important issues to ignore. It’s a Russia whose backsliding on political modernization is likely to get worse before it gets better, and whose leadership is neither overly concerned about its image nor much inclined to explain itself to the outside world. It’s a Russia whose assertiveness in its neighborhood and interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role beyond it will sometimes cause significant problems.4
Pessimistic analysis, of course, did not constitute a strategy. My argument was that if the strategic partnership that had fitfully and loosely framed aspirations in Washington and Moscow for much of the 1990s was out of reach, it was worth testing whether a partnership on a few key strategic issues was possible. That might put the relationship on a steadier track, with limited cooperation balancing inevitable differences.
I REALIZED THAT stabilizing the relationship, after all the ups and downs of the previous decade and a half, would be a long shot. In our last conversation before I left for Moscow, Secretary Rice made clear that she shared my skepticism, although she encouraged the effort. A student of Russia, Rice was hard-nosed about Putin’s repressive behavior at home and his determination to expand Russian influence in its neighborhood, but sympathetic to the notion that we ought to be able to work more effectively together on certain issues. She highlighted in particular nuclear cooperation, where Russia and the United States shared unique capabilities and unique responsibilities. We had a common interest in promoting the security of nuclear materials in our two countries and around the world. We had a similar interest in nonproliferation, especially the challenges posed by Iran and North Korea. And we had a stake in the stable management and further reduction of our existing arsenals.
We also discussed our shared interest in creating more economic ballast in our relationship. U.S. investment in Russia was minuscule, and bilateral trade insignificant, but possibilities were growing in sectors like energy and aerospace. Moreover, Putin had revived Russia’s campaign to join the World Trade Organization. That would require a bilateral agreement with the United States, and the lifting of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, which had denied the Soviet Union a normal trading relationship because of its restriction of Soviet Jewish emigration. That purpose had long since been achieved, but congressional reservations about other aspects of Russian behavior remained, and there were also continuing concerns about Russian barriers against agricultural products and piracy of intellectual property. Rice agreed that it made sense to make another push, as part of a long-term investment in a more open and competitive Russian economy. WTO accession would help reinforce the rule of law, and create a model of progress in the economic system that might someday spill over into the political system. The expansion of trade and investment would give both countries something positive to safeguard in the relationship, and more to lose if differences got out of hand.
I highlighted a third priority, encouraging the gradual increase of exchange programs, mainly aimed at bringing young Russian students and entrepreneurs to the United States and developing the network of some sixty thousand exchange alumni around Russia. With a mostly bleak outlook for any rapid improvement of relations, it made sense to continue to invest in the next generation of Russians and in their deepening stake in individual freedoms and interaction with the rest of the world.
I knew that each of these initiatives could easily be swallowed up by mounting friction over Ukraine and Georgia, as well as the Kremlin’s tightening political squeeze at home. The next couple of years would be critical. Putin was term-limited, and at least according to the Russian constitution would step down as president in 2008. The Russian elite’s obsession with succession would mount as that date grew closer, and it would be important to do all we could to anchor our relationship well before then.
In my first few months in Moscow, I was persistent in engaging senior Russians. One of the most important challenges for any ambassador is to develop wide-ranging contacts, to gain as solid a grasp as possible of the views of different players and their interactions. Russia in those years was particularly difficult terrain, with many senior officials suspicious of American diplomats, and oppositionists under intense scrutiny and pressure.
After I presented my credentials in an elaborate ceremony at the Kremlin, Putin took me aside and stressed his personal respect for President Bush, along with his disappointment in American policy. “You Americans need to listen more,” he said. “You can’t have everything your way anymore. We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms.”
Sergey Ivanov, the minister of defense, was a longtime friend and former KGB colleague of Putin. A fluent English speaker, able to charm or bludgeon as circumstances required, Ivanov had aspirations to succeed Putin. Not shy about projecting strength, he had limited popular appeal, and not much of a political base beyond his personal bond with Putin. His steely personality and ambition unsettled others in Putin’s orbit, and the fact that he had been a far more accomplished KGB officer than his friend may have unsettled Putin a little too. Alone in his office at the Defense Ministry, Ivanov was matter-of-fact about relations with the United States in our first meeting, sharply critical of American naïveté and hubris in underestimating the complexities of Iraq, as well as of Russia’s neighbors. He said forthrightly that it was important to have stable relations between Russia and the United States, but a few “course corrections” were necessary.
Dmitry Medvedev, then the chief of presidential administration at the Kremlin, was another friend of Putin’s with ambitions to succeed him. Medvedev was younger than Ivanov and softer around the edges. Unlike Putin and Ivanov, Medvedev was never a Communist Party member; his whole professional life had unfolded after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Putin, he came from St. Petersburg, but from the better side of the tracks. He grew up in a stable, well-educated suburban family that had escaped the purges and rejected atheism when it became politically possible. Diminutive, polite, lawyerly in manner, and utterly loyal to Putin, Medvedev nevertheless had a spine, and no shortage of drive. As I put it in a cable to Washington after our first meeting, “He would not have survived as long as he has in the dark and unforgiving corridors of the Kremlin if he did not.”5
After an initial meeting in his office, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came to a one-on-one lunch at Spaso House. Lavrov was a world-class diplomat and adept negotiator, with a keen eye for detail and an endlessly creative mind. He could also be prickly and obnoxious, especially if he had a dim regard for his counterpart or had to defend positions he knew were indefensible. A veteran of the peculiar form of multilateral torture that comes with long service at the United Nations, where he was Russia’s permanent representative for nearly a decade, Lavrov had survived deadening hours of UN debate by becoming a gifted sketch artist and cartoonist. (I still have one of his doodles, a wolf’s head whose detail betrays a particularly boring session with a visiting American delegation.) At lunch, after a large glass of his favorite Johnnie Walker Black, Lavrov dissected the mistakes he perceived in American foreign policy in the Bush administration. He took some pleasure in underscoring the ways in which he thought they opened up scope for Russian diplomacy, and warned of trouble ahead over Ukraine and Georgia. He was too smart and too skilled to ignore the potential for cooperation, especially on the economic and nuclear fronts.
One of my most interesting early encounters was with Vladislav Surkov. Surkov was a young Kremlin political advisor—undoubtedly the only Kremlin official with a photo of the rapper Tupac Shakur on his wall. He was also the architect of Putin’s then-fashionable concept of “sovereign democracy,” which put a lot more emphasis on the first part of the term than the second.
Surkov and I later appeared together on a program at MGIMO, Russia’s elite international affairs university for aspiring diplomats and entrepreneurs, focused unusually on the 125th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s birth. With speculation running high about Putin’s intentions in 2008, Surkov cleverly spun FDR’s legacy to highlight his four terms in office, and their significance for the United States at a moment of crisis and transformation. I replied that the main lesson was not FDR’s four terms, which were permitted at the time under our constitution, but rather his historic accomplishments in establishing the political and economic institutions that propelled America out of the Great Depression, through to victory with the Soviet Union in World War II, and into postwar prosperity. Personalities mattered, but democratic institutions endured. Surkov wasn’t convinced.
Nor was he convinced by my pitch to think hard about the consequences of continued democratic rollback for the success of the upcoming G-8 summit in St. Petersburg. Like it or not, I stressed, the summit would bring eight thousand of his closest friends in the international media to Russia. They would have only a passing interest in the main summit theme—energy security. The stories on the domestic front would be far more captivating, and not very uplifting. Surkov just shrugged, reflecting his patron’s utter disregard for international opinion.
I worked just as hard to cast a wide net for contacts and conversations beyond current government officials. Since traffic had become horrendous, I’d sometimes take advantage of the Moscow Metro, to the consternation of my security detail. The Metro retained its Soviet efficiency, with all its jostling and familiar wet wool smells in winter. I met regularly with Putin’s most outspoken opponents, including Garry Kasparov, the legendary former chess champion. Boris Nemtsov, a onetime presidential hopeful turned Putin critic, was always accessible and full of energy and opinions. (He would be murdered a few hundred meters from the walls of the Kremlin in February 2015.) I met frequently with a stalwart group of human rights activists, from the indomitable Lyudmila Alexeyeva, unbowed in her eighties, to younger advocates passionate about concerns that ran the gamut from brutality in Chechnya to environmental degradation and the rights of the disabled.
Moscow had no shortage of larger-than-life personalities. Reviled by many as the breaker of the Soviet empire, Mikhail Gorbachev kept a low profile, sitting in a spacious office in central Moscow, lonely after the death of his wife and concerned about Putin’s increasingly authoritarian instincts. He seemed wistful about what might have been, and a bit lost in the new, gleaming, frantically acquisitive Moscow. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn continued to write relentlessly at a small dacha complex outside Moscow, secure behind a tall green fence. When I went out to see him one late autumn afternoon, he spent a couple hours, as the light was dimming outside, talking about his life, the privations of the war and Communist rule, and the hope he had for Putin and for Russia. He distrusted the materialism of a Russia intoxicated by oil and excess, and emphasized his belief in the spiritual underpinnings of Russian exceptionalism. He saw nothing out of the ordinary about a Russia with predominant influence in the former Soviet space, “including our brothers in Ukraine.” Although he had spent almost two decades in Vermont after his exile from the Soviet Union, he was not a convert to liberal internationalism, and especially not its hawkish neoconservative variant on full display in Iraq.
I made the best use I could of Russian television and newspaper interviews to convey American policy concerns and my commitment to healthier U.S.-Russian relations. I also took the somewhat unusual initiative of offering to appear before the Duma foreign affairs committee to answer questions about American policy. However imperfect my Russian-language skills, the nearly three hours I spent with Duma members that day were a good investment in our relationship. Several apologized afterward for being too harsh in their comments and questions. I assured them that congressional hearings in Washington could be at least as contentious.
I was convinced by my previous experience that no one could hope to understand Russia without exposure to the country beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, nor could Russians understand America if all they had to draw upon was the caricature fed them by the Russian media, most of which was by now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. I made some fifty extended trips outside Moscow during my three years as ambassador, from Kaliningrad in the west to Vladivostok in the east, and from the frigid Arctic north to Sochi on the Black Sea. Lisa and I traveled a good chunk of the Trans-Siberian Railway, still the best way to grasp Russia’s sheer size. I spent a fascinating couple of days in Chukotka, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska, where Roman Abramovich, one of Russia’s wealthiest men, served as governor by long distance, investing heavily in local infrastructure as part of what had become in Putin’s Russia a kind of community service for oligarchs. I had poignant conversations with aging Soviet war veterans in Volgograd, the former Stalingrad.
There were plenty of vodka-filled evenings in Siberia and the Urals, where local governors and their aides tried to drink the visiting American ambassador under the table. Like my predecessors, I practiced all the tricks of the trade—surreptitiously draining my shot glass in the houseplants, slipping water into my glass, sipping instead of chugging—but I was badly outmatched. I continued to indulge my fascination with the North Caucasus, but never managed to return to Chechnya, now ruled harshly by Putin’s rent-a-thug, Ramzan Kadyrov.
WE WORKED HARD to add more economic weight to the relationship and finally overcome trade disputes. Our aim initially was to reach a bilateral trade agreement by the time of the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006, which seemed to fit Putin’s agenda and give us some negotiating leverage. The pace of negotiations was painfully slow. Rapid progress in parallel U.S. negotiations with Ukraine, which resulted in a bilateral accord and a normalization of trade relations in the spring of 2006, only rubbed more salt in the wound for Putin. In a classified email to Rice in April, I painted a gloomy picture. “We have hit the point of diminishing returns in the negotiations. Absent a bold move by the President to close the deal, the Russians are going to slide backwards very quickly, as only they can do, into a swamp of real and imagined grievances. Unfortunately, Putin is taking an increasingly sour attitude toward us on WTO….He’s now at the stage where he’s quite capable of shooting himself (and Russia) in the foot by declaring that Russia doesn’t need the WTO, and the U.S. can shove it.”6
U.S.-Russian negotiations lurched along, and a bilateral deal was finally signed in November 2006—more than a dozen years after negotiations had begun. WTO accession and repeal of Jackson-Vanik would drag on for another several years, and Russia grew to resent the regulatory colonoscopy to which it was subjected—including revisions of hundreds of domestic laws and more than a thousand international agreements. This was nevertheless the single biggest step in our economic relationship in more than a decade.
Meanwhile, we continued to work hard to enlarge two-way trade and investment. I spent considerable time with American business representatives, from the biggest energy companies to medium-sized enterprises trying to get a foothold in the elusive Russian market. Doing business in Russia was not for the fainthearted; one senior American energy executive wound up in his company’s version of the witness protection program, shielded from rapacious Russian partners taking apart a major joint venture. Despite the risk, there were profits to be made and markets to be opened, and I lobbied everyone from the most senior Kremlin officials to regional governors and local administrators on behalf of a level playing field for American companies. American direct investment in Russia increased by 50 percent in 2005–6, and business picked up in both directions.
The most ambitious commercial deal was a nearly $4 billion purchase of Boeing aircraft, including the new 787 Dreamliners. Boeing had a savvy local head of sales and operations, and had made Russian titanium an important component of the new, lighter-weight 787. It had also set up a research and design operation in Moscow that employed some fourteen hundred Russian engineers. It was a smart investment in Russian interest in acquisitions, and a powerful advertisement for what Russia had to offer at the high end of the technology industry. Formally signed in mid-2007, it was the largest nonenergy U.S. venture in post–Cold War Russia, and it encouraged other businesses in other sectors to give the Russian economy a try.
Our progress on nuclear cooperation was equally positive, and equally incremental. Bush and Putin had made broadly similar proposals for global civilian energy cooperation, aimed at boosting nuclear energy as a cleaner alternative to hydrocarbons, and reducing the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation. Among their common ideas was creation of multilateral enrichment facilities to eliminate the need for countries to enrich nuclear material or store and reprocess spent fuel—all of which posed serious proliferation risks. There was also shared interest in a variety of initiatives to ensure the safety and security of nuclear materials. Chafing at remaining the object of U.S. and international concerns about nuclear safety, Putin was eager to widen the lens and show cooperation in dealing with third-party challenges. We saw value in that too. When Qaddafi turned over enriched materials after we negotiated the end of his nuclear program, we arranged for the Russians to take custody. It was striking, and strangely satisfying, to see containers of enriched uranium that had been the object of so many of our efforts in Libya a couple years before sitting in a facility outside Moscow.
To codify our work in this field, we negotiated a bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation agreement in early 2007. Progress on civilian nuclear cooperation helped improve the atmosphere for collaboration on critical nonproliferation issues, especially Iran and North Korea. Although never an easy negotiating partner on UN Security Council resolutions, Russia joined in two significant sanctions measures against both countries in late 2006.
In addition to our efforts on the economic and nuclear fronts, I made a high priority of sustaining and expanding our exchange programs. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings visited to discuss new bilateral education initiatives with her Russian counterpart, including university partnerships and exchanges of secondary school teachers in math and science. We looked for ways to expand English-language training programs in Russia, and Russian-language programs in the United States.
As we pushed forward on these initiatives, we relied on a high tempo of senior-level visits and meetings throughout 2005–6. President Bush met with Putin four times, and Secretary Rice led a steady stream of other cabinet visitors in 2006. Steve Hadley, Rice’s successor as national security advisor, visited too, and was a sensible voice in the sometimes fractious Russia policy debates in Washington. High-level attention helped significantly, but didn’t insulate the relationship from the troubling currents that were gathering momentum.
DESPITE ALL THESE efforts, the steadier track we were looking for in relations with Moscow seemed no closer at the end of 2006 than when I arrived eighteen months before—and in some ways even more remote. For understandable reasons, the patience of pragmatists like Rice and Bob Gates, who succeeded Don Rumsfeld at Defense late in 2006, and President Bush himself, wore thin, and neoconservatives saw an opening to push for a tougher approach. As he became more assertive about Russia’s sense of entitlement in the former Soviet space, the dark side of Putin’s rule at home clouded any remaining glimmers of political openness.
As Putin’s fireplace exchange with Rice in the fall of 2006 made clear, he was growing impatient with Georgia and its president. Mikheil Saakashvili made no secret of his interest in NATO membership and closer ties to the West, and flaunted his relationships in Washington, where he had been lionized by many for his political dexterity during the Rose Revolution and his impressive economic success since then. Although he professed to seek a good relationship with Putin, his glee in poking the Russian bear was unbearable in the Kremlin. Russian policy was based on the presumption that it was entitled to expect—and if not forthcoming voluntarily, to enforce—a substantial degree of deference to its interests on the part of a small and poor neighboring country like Georgia. To Putin’s growing annoyance, Saakashvili was defiantly nondeferential. Not unreasonably, he made clear his determination to recover Abkhazia and South Ossetia, parts of Georgia that had been under de facto Russian occupation for years. He was eager to make tangible progress toward NATO membership, and relished the leverage that any steps forward might give him with Moscow.
There was a growing danger that Saakashvili would overreach and the Kremlin would overreact. Reporting to Washington after a meeting between Putin and Saakashvili in June 2006, I noted, “No one evokes greater neuralgia in Moscow these days than Saakashvili.” Putin’s not-so-subtle message to the Georgian leader was: “You can have your territorial integrity, or you can have NATO membership, but you can’t have both.”7
Earlier that year, I had stressed in another cable that “nowhere is Putin’s determination to stop the erosion of Russia’s influence greater than in his own neighborhood.”8 Georgia was the proximate concern, but Ukraine remained the reddest of red lines for Putin. The Orange Revolution in 2004 was a massive blow for the Kremlin, a warning shot that Ukrainians might drift away from historic dependence on Moscow and toward formal association with the West. The next couple years brought some relief in the Russian leadership, as the victors in Kyiv indulged in the traditional Ukrainian habit of squabbling among themselves and bogging down the economy in corruption and bureaucratism. Putin was acutely sensitive to any signs that the Ukrainian government might encourage Washington to lay out a clearer path to NATO membership, and he was paranoid about American conspiracies.
Russia’s domestic landscape was hardening too. As Putin looked ahead at the likely 2008 succession, he sought to eliminate any potential wild cards and to cow his opponents. Late in 2005, with his encouragement, the Duma introduced a draft law to severely restrict nongovernmental organizations, especially those receiving foreign funding. At the embassy we made strenuous efforts to push back, consulting with Russian NGOs as well as U.S.-based organizations still operating in Russia, and meeting with a variety of Duma leaders and Kremlin officials. I also enlisted my European counterparts in the effort, conscious that the Russian government was more likely to pay attention if we were part of a chorus of concerns, not a solo act. We made a little headway, and the legislation approved by the Duma in the spring of 2006 was slightly less onerous. Nevertheless, the trend line was clear. In case I had missed the message, Surkov drove the point home in a conversation that spring. “NGOs won’t be able to act in Russia as they did in the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Period. In the ’90s we were too weak and distracted to act. Now Russia will defend its sovereignty.”
Ahead of the uncertain 2008 transition, many in the Russian elite were scrambling for wealth and power. Meanwhile, structural problems—corruption, the absence of institutionalized checks and balances, pressure on the media and civil society—were getting worse. “The real danger,” I cabled Washington at one point, “is that the excesses of Putin’s Russia are eating up its successes.”9 Murders of dissidents and prominent journalists were, sadly, not uncommon in Russia in this era. Paul Klebnikov, a courageous American journalist working for Forbes, had been killed in Moscow the year before I arrived. In the fall of 2006, the pace accelerated. Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former Russian security officer turned outspoken critic of the Kremlin, was poisoned in London and died a horrible, protracted death. Responsibility for his killing was traced directly to the Kremlin. Anna Politkovskaya, a fearless journalist for the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who had covered the wars in Chechnya and a variety of abuses in Russian society, was gunned down outside her Moscow apartment. Some suspected that it was no coincidence the murder fell on Putin’s birthday.
As a mark of respect, I went to Politkovskaya’s funeral. I had only met her once, but her reputation and life deserved to be honored, and it was also important for me to make a point about where the United States stood. I recall the day vividly—a cold late-autumn afternoon, dusk settling, a few snowflakes beginning to fall, long lines of mourners, about three thousand altogether, shuffling slowly toward the hall where Politkovskaya’s casket lay. I was asked to speak, along with one of my European colleagues and a couple of editors at Novaya Gazeta. Speaking for a few minutes in Russian, I said that Politkovskaya embodied the best of Russia, and that the best way for all of us to honor her memory was to continue to support the ideals she cherished and the kind of Russia she sought. Not one representative of the Russian government showed up.10
AGAINST THAT DARKENING backdrop, 2007 began with another jolt. In early February, Putin became the first Russian leader to attend the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of transatlantic security experts and officials. He didn’t waste the opportunity to unburden himself. He bitterly criticized American unilateralism, which had “overstepped its national borders in every way.”11 Warning his audience sardonically that his comments might be “unduly polemical,” Putin plowed ahead, assembling in one edgy speech the criticisms he had been making for years. The audience was taken aback, but the senior American official there, Secretary of Defense Gates, responded with aplomb. He noted drily that he shared Putin’s background in intelligence, but thought that “one Cold War was quite enough.”
In an email to Rice shortly afterward, I tried again to explain the mindset in the Kremlin. “The Munich speech,” I wrote, “was the self-absorbed product of fifteen years of accumulated Russian frustrations and grievances, amplified by Putin’s own sense that Russia’s concerns are still often taken for granted or ignored.” Understanding the Kremlin was as much about psychology as about geopolitics. “It’s immensely satisfying psychologically,” I continued, “to be able to take a whack at people after so many years of being down on their luck, and for Russians nothing is more satisfying than poking at Americans, with whom they have tried to compare themselves for so long.” This was a moment that had particular appeal for Russia’s president. “A large element was pure Putin—the attraction of swaggering into a den of transatlantic security wonks, sticking out his chin, and letting them have it with both barrels.”12
There was an element of political convenience for Putin too. Certainly trumpeting about enemies at the gate and overbearing American behavior was a way to divert attention from domestic insecurities. It was also a matter of deep conviction—his sense that Russia had been taken advantage of in the 1990s by oligarchs at home and hypocritical Western friends abroad, and that Putinism was at its core all about fixing the playing field for the Russian state. Putin was giving voice to the pent-up frustrations of many Russians, not just striking an expedient pose. His view of his legacy at that point, and the source of his popularity, was that he had restored order, prosperity, and pride to a Russia sorely lacking in all three when Yeltsin left office.
I had attempted a more detailed stocktaking a couple of weeks earlier in another personal note for the secretary. I reported that Putin’s Russia remained a paradox. On the one hand, Putin and those around him had contracted a case of golovokruzhenie ot uspekhov, “dizziness from success,” an old, Stalin-era slogan appropriate for a new post-Soviet elite awash in petrodollars. The international landscape looked more promising than it had in years, which fed their hubris:
For most of the Russian elite, still intoxicated by an unexpectedly rapid revival of Great Power status, the world around them is full of tactical opportunities. America is distracted and bogged down in Iraq; China and India are unthreatening and thirsty for energy; Europe is consumed with leadership transitions and ultimately pliable; and the Middle East is a mess in which vestigial connections to troublemakers like Syria offer openings for diplomatic station identification. From the Kremlin’s perspective, Russia’s own neighborhood looks a lot better than it did a year ago, with NATO expansion less imminent, Ukraine’s color revolution fading, Georgia at least temporarily sobered, and Central Asia more attentive to Russian interests.13
The picture at home, at least on the surface, looked similarly promising. Putin was now running at 80 percent approval in the polls. The annual economic growth rate was 7 percent, and Russia had put away $300 billion in hard currency reserves. A middle class was emerging, focused on rising standards of living and individual choices that their parents could only have dreamed of, and mostly oblivious to politics. The oligarchs were quiescent, and Putin and his circle, never content to live off their government salaries, were steadily monopolizing major sources of wealth.
“Behind the curtain, however,” I continued, “stands an emperor who is not fully clothed.” As elites became more convinced that Putin was leaving the presidency in 2008, he was finding it harder than he thought to manage a neat succession. The only real checks and balances in Russia revolved not around institutions, but around a single personality. It therefore fell to Putin to convince the motley crew in and around the Kremlin—from the hard men of the security services to the remaining economic modernizers—that his successor would not threaten the current order.14
Beneath all the impressive macroeconomic indicators and apparent stability, troubles lurked. Demographic decline was not an abstract problem if you were one of the lonely thirty million Russians east of the Urals—distributed sparsely over a vast swath of the earth, sitting on vast natural resources, and staring across a long border at nearly a billion and a half Chinese. Corruption was worsening rapidly, as was Russia’s overdependence on unsustainably high-priced hydrocarbons and an equally unsustainable energy infrastructure showing its age and decay from serial underinvestment. The North Caucasus was deceptively quiet, with a security lid on its dysfunctions but no real solutions in sight. And even though it was hard to see a rational prospect for color revolutions bubbling up in Russia, the Kremlin was paranoid about external meddling and insecure about its own grip.
So where did that leave American strategy? I warned that the Russians would likely become even more difficult to deal with, noting that it was a safe prediction they would often “exhibit all the subtlety and grace of the ‘New Russian’ businessmen of the 1990’s—with lots of bling, and a kind of ‘I’m going to drive my Hummer down the sidewalk just because it feels good’ bluster.”15 The Russians’ thirst for respect was insatiable, their sensitivity to being taken for granted always turned on high.
For all its irritations, we couldn’t afford not to engage Putin’s Russia, tempting as that might sometimes be. We’d have to build on common ground where we could, and limit the damage where we couldn’t. I urged that we keep the Europeans close, and be careful about pushing too hard on issues where our key allies might start to back away from us. I stressed in particular that we ought to be “careful about our tactical priorities; if we want to have every issue our way, simultaneously, we’ll make it harder to get what we want on the most important questions.”16 That became a broken-record theme in my messages and conversations over the remainder of my tenure. I knew how hard it was to break the post–Cold War habit of assuming that we could eventually maneuver over or around Moscow when it suited us, and I knew that was especially difficult as an administration looked to cement its legacy on issues like European security and missile defense. I also knew that we were running out of room for maneuver with Putin, and risked bigger collisions on critical issues like Iran if we weren’t careful.
As 2007 unfolded, the question of who would succeed Putin when his second term ended in 2008 weighed increasingly on the Russian elite and clogged up much of the bilateral bandwidth. It was always a mistake to assume anything about Putin, except that he would always do all he could to keep people guessing. There was certainly the possibility that he would engineer a constitutional change to permit a third consecutive term; Duma votes were not exactly a prohibitive challenge for him. But most indications I had from him, as well as from Sergey Ivanov, Surkov, and others, were that Putin at least cared enough about appearances that he would step down. Surkov hinted broadly on several occasions that Putin might well return for a third, nonconsecutive term in 2012, which the constitution permitted. It was also likely that no matter who became president in 2008, Putin would remain the power behind the throne, in whatever role he chose. Nevertheless, it would not be a small thing for a relatively young, healthy, politically unchallenged leader to leave office voluntarily for the first time in a thousand years of Russian history.
Putin was not, however, in any rush to show his hand, and hardly ready to start crating his papers for the presidential library. Medvedev and Sergey Ivanov were clearly the early front-runners. Medvedev, then forty-two, seemed the more modern candidate, but he was also seen as a little soft, an uneasy fit in the rough-and-tumble world of Russian elite politics and international affairs. Ivanov, then fifty-four, was the more traditional model, like Putin a veteran of the KGB, with years of experience as minister of defense; but he was also seen as a little hard, his ambition and self-confidence an uneasy fit for the other hard men in Putin’s circle, and perhaps for Putin himself.
Medvedev had been given a boost at the end of 2005, when Putin moved him from the Kremlin to become first deputy prime minister. He had a chance to mold a more independent political image, and was given charge of the “national priority projects,” which targeted significant chunks of the federal budget toward improvement of housing, healthcare, and education. In January 2007, he led Russia’s delegation to Davos and gave a well-received speech. But Putin was not content to become a lame duck so early. In February 2007, he moved Sergey Ivanov from Defense to become another deputy prime minister. His portfolio focused on reorganizing the aviation, shipping, and high-tech industries, and also included the increasingly profitable arms trade. It also freed him from the endless controversies of the Ministry of Defense, where hazing deaths of recruits and other scandals were political deadweights. Both Ivanov and Medvedev seemed well positioned.
Putin’s concern that outside influence might undermine his orchestration of events bordered on the paranoid. The sharpest exchange I ever had with him came in a private conversation at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in early June 2007. He accused the embassy and American NGOs of funneling money and support to critics of the Kremlin. “Outside interference in our elections,” he said, “will not be tolerated. We know you have diplomats and people who pretend to be diplomats traveling all over Russia encouraging oppositionists.” With the most even tone I could manage, I replied that the outcome of Russia’s elections was obviously for Russians alone to decide. The United States had no business supporting particular candidates or parties, and simply would not do so. We would, however, continue to express support for a fair process, just as we did any place in the world. Putin listened, offered a tight-lipped smile, and said, “Don’t think we won’t react to outside interference.”17
He was convinced we were bent on tilting the political playing field in Russia, and drew a straight line from the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003–4, which he genuinely believed were the product of American conspiracies, to his own 2008 succession drama. The rich irony of Putin’s threat is not lost on me more than a decade later, after Russia’s brazen interference in the 2016 American presidential election.
As 2007 drew to a close, Putin finally tipped his hand and declared that he would support Medvedev as his successor in the March 2008 presidential election. The logic of that choice became clearer in the next couple months, as rumors swirled that Putin would remain in government as prime minister—perfectly acceptable under the Russian constitution. It made sense to have the more malleable and less experienced Medvedev as his partner in this new “tandem” arrangement; it was hard to see Sergey Ivanov being comfortable in that role, or Putin comfortable with him. Russia’s political landscape appeared to be stabilizing. U.S.-Russian relations, on the other hand, were heading in the opposite direction.
THE LIST OF irritants between us continued to grow, but several stood out. One was Kosovo, where the United States had championed a UN-led process to organize Kosovar independence from Serbia. The effort made practical and moral sense. The Kosovars overwhelmingly wanted independence, the status quo was unsustainable, and long delay invited another eruption of violence in the Balkans. For Putin, Kosovo’s independence brought back bad memories of Russian impotence, and loomed as a test of how different his Russia was from Yeltsin’s.
He also had worries, not entirely unfounded, that Kosovo’s independence would set off a chain reaction of pressures, with some in the Russian elite urging him to recognize the independence of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and other disputed territories in the former Soviet Union. Putin was not at all shy about using those conflicts as levers, especially with Saakashvili, but his preference was to keep them frozen. He also knew that separatist tendencies in the North Caucasus, inside the Russian Federation itself, had not been fully extinguished, and he did not want to see them rekindled. “The notion that Russia can’t be pushed around again as it was in 1999, and that the issue of North Caucasus separatism has been settled,” I wrote in the summer of 2007, “are two of the cardinal elements of Putin’s own sense of legacy, and he will fiercely resist revisiting either of them.”18 Nevertheless, the UN plan authored by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari was moving down the track, with Kosovo’s independence within sight by the end of 2007.
A second problem was the question of NATO expansion, this time to Ukraine and Georgia. There had been two waves of NATO expansion since the end of the Cold War: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were offered membership in the second half of the 1990s, and then the Baltic states and four more Central European states a few years later. Yeltsin had gnashed his teeth over the first wave, but couldn’t do much about it. Putin offered little resistance to Baltic membership, amid all the other preoccupations of his first term. Georgia, and especially Ukraine, were different animals altogether. There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard against any steps in the direction of NATO membership for either state. In Washington, however, there was a kind of geopolitical and ideological inertia at work, with strong interest from Vice President Cheney and large parts of the interagency bureaucracy in a “Membership Action Plan” (MAP) for Ukraine and Georgia. Key European allies, in particular Germany and France, were dead set against offering it. They were disinclined to add to mounting friction between Moscow and the West—and unprepared to commit themselves formally and militarily to the defense of Tbilisi or Kyiv against the Russians. The Bush administration understood the objections, but still felt it could finesse the issue.
Completing the trifecta of troubles was the vexing issue of missile defense. Anxious about American superiority in missile defense technology since the Soviet era, the Russians were always nervous that U.S. advances in the field, whatever their stated purposes, would put Moscow at a serious strategic disadvantage. Putin had swallowed the U.S. abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty early in the Bush administration, but resented it deeply as another example, in his eyes, of the United States throwing its weight around at Russia’s expense. By 2007, the United States had begun fielding missile defense capabilities in Alaska and California, aimed at the emerging North Korean threat. More worrying for Putin were American plans to build new radar and interceptor sites in the Czech Republic and Poland to counter a potential Iranian missile threat. Putin didn’t buy the argument that an Iranian threat was imminent; and even if it was, his specialists told him (not unreasonably) that it would be technically smarter to deploy new missile defense systems in the southeast Mediterranean, or Italy, and that Aegis shipborne systems could be an effective ingredient. No amount of argument about the technological limitations of systems based in the Czech Republic and Poland against theoretical Russian targets, however soundly based, swayed Putin and his innately suspicious military. Their longer-term concern was not so much about the particular technologies that might be deployed in new NATO states in Central Europe as it was about what those technologies might mean as part of a future, globalized American missile defense system. At the core of their opposition was also the weight of history. For many in Russia, especially in Putin’s orbit of security and intelligence hardliners, you could build a Disney theme park in Poland and they would find it faintly threatening.
I had done my best over the previous two and a half years to signal the brewing problems in the relationship and what might be done to head them off. I knew I was straining the patience of some in Washington, who chafed at my warnings of troubles to come when they were consumed with the challenges that had already arrived. I decided, however, that I owed Secretary Rice and the White House one more attempt to collect my concerns and recommendations in one place.
On a typically dreary Friday afternoon in early February 2008, with snow falling steadily against the gray Moscow sky outside my office window, I sat down and composed a long personal email to Secretary Rice, which she later shared with Steve Hadley and Bob Gates. While more formal diplomatic cables still had their uses, classified emails were faster, more direct, and more discreet—in this case a better way to convey the urgency and scope of my concerns.
“The next couple months will be among the most consequential in recent U.S.-Russian relations,” I wrote. “We face three potential trainwrecks: Kosovo, MAP for Ukraine/Georgia, and missile defense. We’ve got a high-priority problem with Iran that will be extremely hard…to address without the Russians. We’ve got a chance to do something enduring with the Russians on nuclear cooperation…and we’ve got an opportunity to get off on a better foot with a reconfigured Russian leadership after Medvedev’s likely election, and to help the Russians get across the finish line into WTO this year, which is among the most practical things we can do to promote the long-term prospects for political and economic modernization in this proud, prickly and complicated society.” I tried to be clear about what should be done:
My view is that we can only manage one of those three trainwrecks without doing real damage to a relationship we don’t have the luxury of ignoring. From my admittedly parochial perspective here, it’s hard to see how we could get the key Europeans to support us on all three at the same time. I’d opt for plowing ahead resolutely on Kosovo; deferring MAP for Ukraine or Georgia until a stronger foundation is laid; and going to Putin directly while he’s still in the Presidency to try and cut a deal on missile defense, as part of a broader security framework.
I fully understand how difficult a decision to hold off on MAP will be. But it’s equally hard to overstate the strategic consequences of a premature MAP offer, especially to Ukraine. Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze….It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. On Georgia, the combination of Kosovo independence and a MAP offer would likely lead to recognition of Abkhazia, however counterproductive that might be to Russia’s own long-term interests in the Caucasus. The prospects of subsequent Russian-Georgian armed conflict would be high.
I pushed my luck a little in the next passage. If, in the end, we decided to push MAP offers for Ukraine and Georgia, I wrote, “you can probably stop reading here. I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.” On missile defense, I urged that we not be in a rush on the Polish and Czech deployment plans, continue to seek ways in which we might find a basis for cooperation with Russia, and work harder to link this issue to Russian collaboration in countering the Iranian missile and nuclear threats—which were, after all, the proximate reasons for our initiative. If we could get the Russians to work more closely with us and slow or block Iranian advances, that would serve the main strategic purpose that animated our plans in Central Europe.
I repeated my arguments for pressing ahead on economic and nuclear cooperation as Putin prepared to launch the “tandem” arrangement with Medvedev. We ought to engage the Russians on the possibility of a new strategic arms reduction accord, beyond the START agreement that would soon expire. We should continue to work hard on nonproliferation challenges. Iran was one important example. North Korea was another. The Russians had far less direct influence in Pyongyang than did the Chinese, but wanted to play a role.
My case for economic cooperation was still built around WTO accession and supporting American trade and investment. I always thought that over the longer term, that was one of the best of the limited bets available to us to advance the president’s freedom agenda in Russia, helping slowly to deepen the self-interest of Russians in the rule of law. “That wouldn’t change the reality,” I noted, “that Russia is a deeply authoritarian and overcentralized state today, whose dismal record on human rights and political freedoms deserves our criticism.” But over time it might reinforce the instincts for protecting private property and market-driven opportunity that were slowly building a middle class, and open up a massively undertapped market for American companies.19
Rice was appreciative and encouraged me to keep pressing my views. Both she and Gates shared at least some of my concerns on MAP, but I sensed that the debate in Washington was still tilting toward a strong, legacy-building effort to engineer a MAP offer for Ukraine and Georgia at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. There was similar fin-de-administration momentum behind the missile defense project in Poland and the Czech Republic, now that Kosovo’s independence was a done deal.
Both Rice and Gates, and President Bush himself, had spent a lot of time in 2007 trying to engage the Russians on all these issues. Gates visited in April, not long after his encounter with Putin at Munich, and displayed a sure feel for the Russians, the product of decades of experience during the Cold War and his own savvy, pragmatic judgment and good humor. The latter was especially useful in his formal conversations with the new defense minister, Anatoliy Serdyukov, a former furniture trader from St. Petersburg who had endeared himself to Putin as chief of the federal tax collection service, and implementer of the brutal demolition of Mikhail Khodorkovsky several years before. Serdyukov was entirely unschooled in defense matters or diplomacy, and mostly read his talking points from a stack of index cards. Gates parried his points respectfully, occasionally passing me notes with his unvarnished thoughts about our host, who he concluded should have stuck to furniture sales.
Rice, determined to do what she could to ease tensions, came to Moscow in May. President Bush saw Putin on the margins of the G-8 summit in Germany in June, where Putin suggested the use of a Russian-operated radar facility in Azerbaijan, which he intended as an alternative, not a complement, to a Central European site. When Putin came to Kennebunkport, Maine, in July, the Russian leader added the possibility of using an existing early-warning facility at Armavir, in southern Russia. The two leaders agreed that their experts should study the ideas, in hopes of developing a joint approach. Extensive working-level discussions ensued. The limited technical capacity of the two Russian-proposed sites was one concern; the bigger issue was that the Russians saw their offers as a substitute for U.S. plans in Central Europe, while Washington was willing to consider them (at most) as add-ons.
The Kennebunkport meeting showed both the cordiality of the Bush-Putin relationship and its limitations. Relaxed and gracious at their summer home, the Bush family wrapped Putin and his delegation in warmth and hospitality. I told President Bush afterward that I thought Putin had been genuinely touched by the invitation, and he was not someone easily touched by gestures of any kind. But I left feeling that Russians and Americans were still talking past one another and hurtling down the track toward a wreck of one kind or another.
In March 2008, just before Medvedev was elected as president, I had an unusual conversation with Putin, which only reinforced my worries. President Bush had asked me to deliver a message to Putin. Its contents were straightforward: outlining again our position on Kosovo; emphasizing our hope that we could still work out some acceptable formula on missile defense; indicating that any move forward at the Bucharest summit toward NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia should not be seen as threatening; and underscoring our continued commitment to Russia’s accession to the WTO. President Bush also confirmed that he’d accept Putin’s invitation to visit Sochi and hope they’d take advantage of their last meeting as presidents to discuss a “strategic framework” to guide the U.S.-Russian relationship.
Putin didn’t often agree to separate meetings with me, and almost never saw other ambassadors. Most of our encounters during my tenure were on the margins of other events, or with visiting senior U.S. officials. This time I was invited to come to the presidential dacha at Novo Ogaryovo, just outside Moscow. I was asked to come alone. Arriving at the appointed time, I was ushered into a reception room, with the usual assortment of bottled Russian mineral water and snacks. Putin was just finishing a meeting with the Security Council, a protocol assistant told me. I half expected a replay of the experience Rice and I had had, and wondered if I was going to have to navigate that not especially receptive audience before my session with Putin. I was also thinking through how best to convey my fairly lengthy message, well aware that Putin had little patience for long-winded presentations.
Almost as if to spare me from my mounting anxiety, I was ushered into Putin’s conference room. It was bright and airy, with light pine walls and furniture. Adding to the brightness, I quickly realized, were a dozen press cameras. Having been in Russia long enough to cultivate a bit of paranoia, I immediately thought this was a trap, an opportunity for Putin to lace into U.S. policy and its quavering representative. I was wrong. With the cameras running, Putin made some general comments about the potential of the Russian-American relationship, despite our differences. Noting that my tour as ambassador was nearing its end, he thanked me for being an honest and professional envoy for my country. I stumbled around a little in Russian in my reply, emphasizing how much I enjoyed serving in Russia. We would inevitably have disagreements, sometimes sharp ones, but stable relations were in the interests of both our countries, and of the wider world. Putin nodded, the camera lights went off, and the press left.
With Sergey Lavrov sitting beside him and the rest of the room cleared, Putin looked at me with his customary expressionless demeanor and invited me to deliver the message I was bearing. I condensed my points as best I could, without losing any of their meaning or precision. It took me about ten minutes. Somewhat to my surprise, Putin didn’t interrupt at all, and didn’t roll his eyes or make side comments to Lavrov. When I finished, he thanked me politely and said he would look forward to seeing President Bush, and would offer a few preliminary comments—none of which, he added, would surprise me.
Putin’s intimidating aura is often belied by his controlled mannerisms, modulated tone, and steady gaze. He’ll slouch a bit and look bored by it all if not engaged by the subject or the person across from him, and be snarky and bullying if he’s feeling pressed. But he can get quite animated if he wants to drive home a point, his eyes flashing and his voice rising in pitch. In this exchange, Putin displayed his full range.
As I took careful notes, he said, “Your government has made a big mistake on Kosovo. Don’t you see how that encourages conflict and monoethnic states all over the world?” Shaking his head ruefully, he observed, “I’m glad you didn’t try to tell me that Kosovo is not a precedent. That’s a ridiculous argument.” I smiled a little to myself, grateful that that was one point I had persuaded my colleagues in Washington to delete in the drafting process. Then Putin moved on to MAP. “No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia. Even President Chubais or President Kasyanov [two of Russia’s better-known liberals] would have to fight back on this issue. We would do all in our power to prevent it.” Growing angry, Putin continued, “If people want to limit and weaken Russia, why do they have to do it through NATO enlargement? Doesn’t your government know that Ukraine is unstable and immature politically, and NATO is a very divisive issue there? Don’t you know that Ukraine is not even a real country? Part of it is really East European, and part is really Russian. This would be another mistake in American diplomacy, and I know Germany and France are not ready anyway.”
On other issues, Putin was mostly dismissive. Looking perturbed and waving his arm, he said the United States wasn’t listening on missile defense. “Unfortunately, the U.S. just wants to go off on its own again.” He was scathing on Jackson-Vanik. “You’ve been teasing us on this for years.” It was “indecent” to keep prolonging the process, or leveraging Jackson-Vanik to settle agricultural trade issues. Even Soviet-era refuseniks, he said, were insulted by the continuation of the policy. They complained to him, “We didn’t go to jail for the sake of poultry.”
We went back and forth over some of these issues for over an hour. Putin’s patience was wearing thin, and Lavrov was doodling intently, which I took as a signal to wrap things up. I thanked Putin for his time and said I would convey all his comments to Washington. I congratulated him on winning the Winter Olympics for Sochi in 2014, an effort in which he had invested significant personal energy, working hard on his English for the presentation to the International Olympic Committee, and even harder to grease the palms of its commissioners. Putin finally brightened, smiled, and said the Winter Olympics would be a great moment for Russia. He shook my hand, and I went back out to my car for the ride back to Moscow.
THE BUCHAREST NATO summit had moments of high drama, with President Bush and Secretary Rice still hoping to find a way to produce MAP offers. Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy were dug in firmly in opposition. In the end, the curious outcome was a public statement, issued on behalf of the alliance by Merkel and Rice, that “we agreed today that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO.”20 There was no mention of MAP, which disappointed Kyiv and Tbilisi, but what the statement lacked in practical import it seemed to more than make up for in clarity of direction. Putin came the next day for a charged NATO–Russia Council meeting, and vented his concerns forcefully. In many ways, Bucharest left us with the worst of both worlds—indulging the Ukrainians and Georgians in hopes of NATO membership on which we were unlikely to deliver, while reinforcing Putin’s sense that we were determined to pursue a course he saw as an existential threat.
President Bush arrived in Sochi two days later. Sochi was Putin’s pride and joy, an old Soviet spa town on the Black Sea, with a temperate climate, pebbly beaches, and a few forlorn-looking palm trees set against snowcapped mountains an hour’s drive away. Putin had built an expansive retreat just outside town, where he spent increasing amounts of time and received foreign visitors. The basic infrastructure, like so much of the rest of Russia outside the emerald cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, was extremely run-down. The few hotels had all the beat-up charm that I remembered from the late Soviet era, and the Olympic skating, ice hockey, and skiing venues were still on the drawing board. A new airport was planned but construction had not yet begun; Air Force One looked out of place on the bedraggled runway, with weeds popping up through the concrete and the terminal building a ramshackle affair.
In a cable to the president and Secretary Rice before the visit, I had predicted that “while cocky and combative as ever, still without a mellow bone in his body, Putin will likely soften his roughest edges in Sochi.”21 To my relief, that had proven mostly true. Putin was certainly mad about NATO opening the door to Ukrainian and Georgian membership, and was already thinking of ways to tighten the screws on both to make his displeasure even clearer. Yet he also liked Bush and didn’t want to embarrass him on his valedictory visit. Moreover, he was anxious to get the “tandem” experiment off to a good start and show both his international and domestic audiences that he could make it work. The Russian elite was still a little uncertain about the whole idea. In my message to the president, I had recounted an experience at an event in Moscow the previous week, during which I listened to longtime mayor Yuri Luzhkov pontificate at some length to a group about the merits of the tandem arrangement. When I asked him afterward if he really believed that, he laughed uproariously and said, “Of course not. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”22
Relaxed by the setting, Putin and Bush covered the familiar range of issues thoroughly and civilly. Putin was pointed on Ukraine and Georgia in a smaller session with the president, repeating his view that we didn’t understand what an unwieldy place Ukraine was, and how close Saakashvili was to provoking him. He didn’t belabor his concern, however, and the overall atmosphere was remarkably cordial. At a concluding dinner, Putin and Medvedev sat with the president, talking and joking, and generally conveying a sense that our relationship was solid enough to endure whatever troubles lay ahead. The after-dinner entertainment featured Russian folk music and a group of local dancers who invited members of the delegations to join them on the small stage. Several Russian officials, their alcohol consumption outpacing their abstemious president, climbed up and danced energetically. I wasn’t brave enough, clinging to what remained of my ambassadorial dignity. A few of my less inhibited colleagues made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in rhythm. Chuckling, President Bush said as we were walking out, “I didn’t see you up there, but maybe that was smart. Our folks looked like mice on a hot plate.”
I WOULD LEAVE Moscow a month later. Earlier that spring, Secretary Rice had asked me to return to the State Department as undersecretary for political affairs, the third-ranking position in the department and traditionally the highest post to which a career officer could aspire. I departed with a sense of foreboding. For all our efforts to steady the relationship, some kind of crash seemed more and more likely.
Putin was determined to take Saakashvili down a peg, and perhaps also to show, in the wake of the Bucharest statement, that the Germans and French were right to see Georgia’s not-so-frozen conflicts as a long-term obstacle to NATO membership. He was clearly baiting the impulsive Georgian president, who may have wanted for his own reasons after Bucharest to act in South Ossetia and force a resolution of the disputes there and in Abkhazia. Rice visited Tbilisi in July and pushed Saakashvili hard not to take the bait. He heard other, more encouraging voices in Washington, including in the vice president’s office, and couldn’t resist the temptation to move, as the Russians continued to prod and provoke, their trap carefully laid. On the night of August 7, the Georgians launched an artillery barrage on Tskhinvali, the tiny South Ossetian capital, killing a number of Ossetes and Russian peacekeepers. Already poised, the Russians sent a large force through the Roki Tunnel between North and South Ossetia, routed the Georgians, and within a few days were on the verge of seizing Tbilisi and overthrowing Saakashvili. European diplomatic intervention led by French president Sarkozy, in close coordination with the United States, produced a cease-fire. The damage was done, however, leaving U.S.-Russian relations in their worst shape since the end of the Cold War.
The slow-motion trainwreck in U.S.-Russian relations that had its flaming culmination in Georgia in August 2008 had more than one cause. Certainly, the complexes of Putin’s Russia were on vivid display—pent-up grievance, wounded pride, suspicion of American motives and color revolutions, a sense of entitlement about Russia’s great power prerogatives and sphere of influence, and Putin’s particular autocratic zeal for translating all those passions into calculated aggression. Saakashvili’s impulsiveness didn’t help. Neither did our own post–Cold War complexes, born of the self-confidence of the unipolar moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the searing experience of 9/11. Restraint and compromise seemed unappealing and unnecessary, given our strength and sense of mission. They seemed especially unappealing with Putin’s Russia, a declining power with a nasty repressive streak.
Whether a crash could have been avoided, and a difficult but more stable relationship constructed, is a hard question. The next administration would take its own run at answering it, with a sustained effort to “reset” relations with Russia that produced early dividends. It ended, however, with an even bigger trainwreck, and not much to show for my quarter century of episodic involvement in relations between Russia and America. It was another lesson in the complexities of diplomacy, and the risks of wishful thinking—both about the disruptive Mr. Putin and our own capacity to maneuver over or around him.
Over the next decade, Putin’s confidence and risk tolerance would deepen further. Increasingly convinced of his ability to “play strongly with weak cards,” increasingly disdainful of “poor players” of stronger hands like the irresolute and divided Americans and Europeans, Putin gradually shifted from testing the West in places where Russia had a greater stake and more appetite for risk, like Ukraine and Georgia, to places where the West had a far greater stake, like the integrity of its democracies.