The Russian people were bruised by the shifts in international relations after 1991. The USSR had been one of the two superpowers. The earth shook wherever the Soviet leadership walked, and the Kremlin was widely respected. Where respect was lacking, fear filled the space. Yeltsin sought to integrate the new Russia in the world order as a normal, cooperative, constructive great power. This was always going to be an uphill struggle when the Russian Federation had a ruined economy, a shattered administration and a demoralized army. Independence was accompanied by fallen pride.
Resentment can grow like a tumour in countries that endure such a reversal of fortune. Millions of Germans in the 1920s burned with anger at how their governing elites had allegedly stabbed Germany and its armed forces in the back and brought about defeat in the First World War. And after the Second World War, when financial exigency compelled the British to give up their imperial territories, umbrage was taken about the loss of global power and prestige. When governments fail to compensate for such emotional disturbance, awful consequences can flow. This was among the reasons for Adolf Hitler’s rise to the German chancellorship in 1933; and though the United Kingdom did not crumple into political extremism, the after-effects of the end of empire continue to be registered. The USSR lost the Cold War. Though Gorbachëv and Yeltsin asserted that there was no victor, they failed to dispel the national feeling of humiliation among countless Russians. It was a sentiment that Putin and his contemporaries shared at the turn of the millennium. In Britain and France this state of mind is called a post-imperial syndrome. What Russia has been experiencing is not just a post-imperial but also a post-superpower syndrome. Nobody should underestimate the intensity of these feelings.
Like Putin, many Russians regret the post-1991 reality that, when they cross from the outermost Russian provinces, they find themselves in foreign countries such as Ukraine or Kazakhstan. For centuries they have been told to delight in the achievements of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Nowadays they have a special term for the states that were formed when the USSR fell apart: ‘the near abroad’ – a sign that they do not think of Ukraine or even Uzbekistan and Estonia as being quite as foreign as Greece and France. When Britain, France and other European powers relinquished their empires, their colonies were overseas. The Russians had an empire made up of neighbouring countries, a fact of geography that makes it difficult for them to forget about the imperial loss. In the 1990s the Russian Federation went through a prolonged economic recession. Most Russians, except for the tiny minority that benefited from the privatizations, were floored by poverty and were indignant that Moscow, the capital of a motherland that had been one of the world’s superpowers, became a waiter at the tables of global diplomacy.
Putin was not the first Russian president to object to American global policy. Yeltsin had complained to President Bill Clinton about the difficulty he had in calming Russian public opinion after America’s military intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Debate in Russia grew red hot in early 1996 after Clinton ordered the bombing of Bosnian Serb forces. This happened at a time when Yeltsin was engaged in his campaign for re-election to the Russian presidency. When he appealed for Western leaders to appreciate his problems he was ignored, and NATO war planes continued to attack targets in Bosnia.1 It was a lesson for Russia about its diminished status in world politics. Russia might have inherited the USSR’s seat on the United Nations Security Council, but the reality was that America and its allies placed no curbs on their behaviour. When Yeltsin offered Moscow as the site for Yugoslav peace talks, he was brusquely disregarded. Little consideration was shown about Yeltsin’s need to enhance his international prestige and shore up his standing in Russia.2
Yeltsin was also caught inside the force field of Western financial pressures. The International Monetary Fund closely supervised what was done with the money that was lent to Moscow. The Russian media reported on Yeltsin’s inability to reject external demands. Inside the ruling elite there was mounting disquiet about the country’s humbled condition. The wars in former Yugoslavia were a television spectacle. The Russian people watched and were horrified. Yeltsin himself grew agitated and explained his concerns privately to Bill Clinton. The Partnership for Peace arrangements between Russia and NATO, inaugurated in 1994, had failed to deter the Americans in March 1999 from welcoming Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO membership. This happened shortly before Yeltsin stepped down from the presidency, and it was Putin who had to deal with the consequences.
At first Putin handled the situation calmly and sought to improve Russia’s dealings with America. But when the relationship foundered, he would look back in anger:
First, in the mid-1990s there were the [air] strikes against Belgrade. Essentially, this was aggression . . . This was barbaric, simply barbaric. All the more so because it was done by ignoring the UN Charter and nobody sanctioned it. When confronted with this, people immediately started saying that things were outdated and change of some kind was needed.
Between March and June 1999, America and its allies bombed Serbia into submission without approval from the United Nations Security Council. The military campaign was in reaction to the brutal Serbian persecution of the Muslims of Kosovo, an enclave in Serbia’s south. Serbia’s defeat resulted in President Milošević’s fall from power in Belgrade, and for the Russian authorities the episode marked a disruption of such order as existed in Europe after the Cold War.
And for Putin, Serbia was not the sum total of American misbehaviour:
Things got worse with the events in Iraq. Did the UN sanction the operations in Iraq? No! And beforehand there were operations in Afghanistan in 2001. Yes, we all know the tragedy of September 11 2001, but, even so, under existing international law, an approach should have been made to the UN Security Council and an appropriate resolution should have been received from the start. No.
Then came Iraq. Then the resolution was passed on Libya. No. Everyone’s an expert here and knows and has read the resolution on Libya. What is written in it? A no-fly zone there. But what kind of no-fly zone was it if they began to conduct airborne missile strikes against [Libyan] territory? They crudely distorted and violated the UN Charter.
And then came Syria.3
He also defends Yeltsin against Western accusations of drunken incompetence:
As soon as he raised his voice in defence of Yugoslavia, he immediately turned into an alcoholic and a generally disreputable person in the eyes of Westerners. Everybody suddenly discovered that Boris Nikolaevich liked a drink. But was it really any secret beforehand? No, and it did not hinder his contacts with the outside world. As soon as it became a matter of defending Russian interests in the Balkans and Yeltsin talked openly about it, he turned almost into the West’s enemy.4
This, according to Putin, was why the Americans ‘set the dogs’ on Yeltsin, and he had no intention of becoming their next quarry.5
He is convinced that Russia’s international difficulties can be traced to the United States’ handling of the collapse of the USSR:
The need was to carry out a rational reconstruction and adapt the system of international relations to the new realities. However, the United States in my opinion, having declared itself the winner of the ‘Cold War’, self-confidently saw no need for this. And instead of establishing a new balance of forces, which is the necessary condition for order and stability, they took steps that produced a sharp and deep imbalance.
The ‘Cold War’ ended. But it did not culminate in the conclusion of a ‘peace’ with clear and transparent agreements on the observance of existing rules and standards or on the creation of new ones. This created the impression that the so-called victors in the ‘Cold War’ had decided to pressurize the situation and bring the entire world under their control to suit their interests. And if the existing system of international relations and of international law and the system of checks and balances got in the way of achieving this objective, this system was declared worthless, outdated and in need of immediate removal.6
He omitted to explain how anyone could have stopped Milošević’s butchery of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo except by force.
Hating to appear weak, Putin only rarely complains publicly about how the world handles Russia. But just occasionally he lets rip, as in an interview with Germany’s Bild magazine on 5 January 2016, when he was asked about European security. In response, Putin denounced the eastward expansion of NATO beyond Germany. He referred to confidential transcripts of Gorbachëv’s Moscow conversations with German politicians in 1990. Putin said that there had been no proper agreement on how to end the Cold War and the East–West division in Europe and that there should be no increase in the number of NATO members. Discarding the fact that Gorbachëv never got this in writing from President George H. W. Bush or Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Putin implied that Russia had been cheated by subsequent Western decisions.7
Turning to earlier history, however, Putin has acknowledged that Stalin made a gross error in forcing through the communization of eastern Europe in the late 1940s and rejects the idea that the Reds came to the Baltic States as conquerors as much as liberators. Entirely missing from the Kremlin’s account is any acknowledgement that America and its allies did not push Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into applying for NATO membership. The three countries shared an unenviable history. In 1944 the USSR brutally annexed all of them, and memories of ‘Russian’ imperialism were vivid for their politicians and peoples, who sought security guarantees against Russia’s potential expansionism. The same attitude prevailed in Poland and other countries of central and east-central Europe, which the Soviet Union had held in political thrall after the Second World War. Throughout the 1990s worries persisted about Russia’s potential to become a threat to all its neighbours. The fact that Russia, a nuclear power, was seen as being led by a dangerously volatile drunk added to the anxiety. This may have been harsh on Yeltsin, who rarely added to global tensions, but it was understandable that many countries in the region took a jaundiced view of Russian professions of good faith – and such countries continually called upon the Americans to let them join NATO.8
Clinton hesitated to comply for fear of offending or undermining Yeltsin. The Germans were equally reluctant.9 But a process began in 1999 that would come to a climax in 2004 under George W. Bush. Though both Clinton and Bush believed that the American interest lay in rendering the eastern half of the continent secure for American power and American business, it was governments from Tallinn to Sofia that supplied the decisive impetus for NATO’s enlargement. They had to surmount German vacillation before agreement could be reached.
Putin tried to seem unbothered by the rush to join NATO. This was his stance even after 2004, when his hopes for a partnership with the United States had ended. Behind the scenes, though, Russian diplomats had always taken a different line. When Slovakia pressed to enter the alliance, its diplomats received a frosty reception in Moscow. Sergei Prikhodko, who had acquired influence in the making of foreign policy under Yeltsin and Putin, rejected Slovakian assurances that no hostility towards Russia was implied. Scorning Bratislava’s protestations, Prikhodko warned that Slovakia would be regarded as an ‘enemy country’ if it insisted on joining the American-led military alliance.10 The Russians also used rough language in their talks with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, countries they regarded as belonging to a special zone of interest because they had been part of the USSR. The fact that Putin hardly ever makes public mention of them is not a sign that he does not bother about them. Rather, the reverse: his reticence is a manifestation of acute disquiet.11
But Russian leaders in the early 2000s saw that unless they declared war, they could not halt the process. Slovakia joined NATO along with the so-called Baltic States and others in 2004. Albania and Croatia were admitted in 2009, Montenegro in 2017. If Putin did any growling, he kept it to confidential meetings of fellow Russians. But the hurt felt in the Kremlin was real, and the blame was placed upon the Americans.
Putin is also exercised by what he perceives to be the active help given by America to anti-Soviet and anti-Russian international terrorist organizations since the 1980s:
In their time they sponsored Islamist extremist movements to fight the Soviet Union which were battle-hardened in Afghanistan. From them grew both the ‘Taliban’ and ‘Al-Qaeda’. The West, if it didn’t support, did at least close its eyes [about this] and I would say it really did give support in the form of information and political and financial assistance for international terrorists to penetrate Russia – we have not forgotten this – and the countries of the Central Asian region. Only after horrific terrorist attacks were committed on the soil of the United States itself did there grow an understanding of the common threat of terrorism.12
In 2001, nevertheless, the Russians had agreed to the Americans using Karshi-Khanabad in southern Uzbekistan as a base from which the United States air force could send bombers to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Russian leadership saw this as an altruistic gesture that Washington repaid with ingratitude.
But, again, this is a squint-eyed way of looking at the situation. Uzbekistan was supposedly an independent state, free from Russian interference. But Russia expected the whole of ex-Soviet central Asia to be in its privileged zone of influence and the Russian sanction for the Khanabad facilities suited the interests of Russia’s own security. The Taliban remained a menace long after the Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. In the years that followed the security service reported that Chechen jihadists were being trained in Afghan camps as the Taliban lent support from afar to armed jihad in the Russian Federation. When the Americans indicated their ambition to wipe out the training camps, Moscow was delighted. Putin, his special services and his Defence Ministry were content for someone else to eliminate terrorists who might be intending to return to Chechnya.13
Nevertheless, the Kremlin also claims that Washington is scheming to break up Russia. As early as 2004 Putin implied that the Americans were conniving in the growth of jihadism on Russian territory:
Some people want to tear a fat, tasty piece of the pie from us. Others are helping them. They help them because they think that Russia, as one of the world’s great nuclear powers, still represents a threat to them. This, for them, is why the threat needs to be removed.
And, of course, terrorism is only an instrument to attain these objectives.14
Little noticed at the time, Putin’s remark was a sign of a serious willingness to challenge America.
Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, the ex-KGB officer who ran the FSB from 1999 to 2008, declares the Americans have held on to the Cold War military doctrine that built confrontation into their planning.15 He argues that America’s rulers want to seize the incomparable natural resources of Russia’s outlying regions. Though Putin has not gone this far in public, he does contend, drawing on his experience as FSB director in 1998–9, that the West provided ‘complete support of separatism and radicalism in the North Caucasus’.16 The international dimensions of terrorism are a murky subject. Andrei Kovalëv, who served on Russia’s Security Council until 2001, has recalled that the Russian security agencies pushed for schemes to fund Islamist jihadi groups in Western countries.17 Since that time, efforts have been made to establish a cooperative framework for combating terrorism in Russia and the West. But Putin still bears a grudge about Western activity and sets his face against further external interference.
The Russian ruling group habitually thinks and talks in terms of enemies, threats and confrontations. Nor is this the monopoly of intelligence professionals.18 Sergei Glazev, one of Putin’s leading economic advisers since July 2012, enjoys making anti-American tirades. It was the United States, he contends, that was behind the 1991 accords to break up the USSR. With typical hyperbole, he charges that the Americans are conducting a ‘hybrid world war’ against Russia by means of their control of the global banking system. He maintains that Washington exploits its mastery in information technology to exert what he calls cognitive control over the Russian economy. He adds that America is developing Ukraine as a base for a projected armed onslaught on Russia and pulling the European Union along with it.19 Glazev even declares, as if no corroboration is required, that it was the United States which dragged Russia into the wars in Ukraine and Syria.20
Looking at the past, Glazev opines that Alexander I and Nicholas II made the cardinal error of partnering the United Kingdom when it plainly made no sense for Russians to go to war against Napoleon’s France or Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany.21 His analysis ignored the elementary fact that in both 1812 and 1914 Russia confronted enemies who were bent on conquering Russian territory. But Glazev remains untethered to requirements of historical plausibility. His goal was to steer the policies of the Russian Federation far away from cooperation with the treacherous United States, which in his eyes has taken the place of perfidious Albion. Suspicion pervades the Kremlin, and America remains the object of their undiluted mistrust. It is a preoccupation that has turned into an obsession.
American leaders have, however, given momentum to that mindset. Putin bridled at President George W. Bush’s decision in 2002 to construct an anti-ballistic missile shield against Iran with facilities in Poland, Romania and Turkey. By 2007 Putin had had enough and announced that the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1988 no longer suited Russia’s national interests. This, the first great agreement on arms reduction leading to the end of the Cold War, was a landmark in the history of European international security. Putin did not follow this up by altering official policy, but the fact that he had signalled a readiness to do so is significant – and the relationship between Russia and America worsened.
Putin also objected to what he saw as American instigation of the upheavals in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan between 2003 and 2005. He denied that it was Georgians, Ukrainians and Kyrgyz themselves who undertook the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in their countries. For Putin, American secret services and American finance lay behind them. It was wounding enough that America’s zone of influence now covered almost the entire former Eastern Bloc in Europe, but when the Americans seemed to be interfering in Russia’s ‘near abroad’, the pain was even sharper. Criticisms of the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 by Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strengthened opinion in the Russian leadership that America was seeking to poke its nose into other people’s affairs.22
On first entering the White House in January 2009, President Barack Obama spoke of a wish to move away from the diplomatic disputes with Russia. His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had her doubts about Obama’s intended ‘reset’ in policy. So too did Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Moscow Ambassador John Beyrle. But Clinton gave Obama’s policy a try. In March 2009 she met Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva and presented him with a red button mounted on a yellow plastic box marked ‘reset’. It was a light-hearted occasion. Unfortunately Clinton was reliant on advisers whose Russian was less than idiomatic. The translation used for ‘reset’ was peregruzka, which means ‘overload’. Lavrov spotted the mistake but nonetheless accepted the gift with a gracious chuckle, which encouraged some hope for an improvement in relations.
In London later that month, Obama had his first meeting with President Medvedev, who had taken office in May 2008, and found him open to his ideas on the reset.23 A former lawyer from the St Petersburg city administration, Medvedev had formed a bond with Putin in the 1990s. A proficient administrator, he became Putin’s Chief of Staff in 2003 and first deputy prime minister in 2005. He was known for his emphasis on the need for the rule of law and for the protection of the rights of small and medium-sized start-up companies. Bland and well mannered, he appeared cut from a different cloth from most of Putin’s other cronies. Obama saw a glimmer of hope for a further improvement in relations with Russia and in July 2009 paid a visit to Moscow, where he made little reference to American anxieties about the extent of human rights abuses in Russia. He also announced the suspension of stage four of Bush’s cherished anti-ballistic missile shield in east-central Europe. Though Obama did not scrap the entire programme, even Putin, who was prime minister at the time, conceded that the Americans had made a ‘correct and brave’ decision. When Putin tried to lecture Obama about the chaos of the 2003 Iraq war, the American president threw him back on his heels by pointing out that he had opposed it from start to finish.24
By March 2010 the way was clear to make the next reduction in Russian and American nuclear weapons arsenals, leading to the 2011 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The Russians seemed to have some confidence in Obama’s good intentions. In May 2010 Russia and China agreed to the American proposals for United Nations sanctions against Iran in reaction to Tehran’s intensified nuclear development programme. Five years later, after agreement was reached with Iran to forestall the militarization of Tehran’s scientific research, the Americans lifted those sanctions, but declined to call off their shield programme. Putin took this badly, implying that the United States was being hostile towards the Russian Federation. He and other Kremlin politicians were also irritated that American administrations reserved their worst rebukes for Russia while garlanding with praise the nearby leaders of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.25 Everyone knew that Baku and Astana were not havens for the rule of law. What is more, Washington let off Beijing with cursory reproaches for its human rights abuses while censuring Moscow. Putin saw only hypocrisy in America’s talk of ideals. In reality, he believed, the Americans were picking on Russia out of self-interest: their purpose was to remove their powerful challenger in global affairs while dressing it up as a matter of principle.
Putin stands firm by his vision of the national interest. In 2016 he snapped at German interviewers who asked whether Russia had made any errors in foreign policy in the previous quarter of a century: ‘Yes, it’s made mistakes. We failed to make our national interests clear, and we should have done this from the start. And if we’d done that, perhaps we would have had a more balanced world.’ When the interviewers inquired further whether his country had failed to articulate its interests, he replied, ‘Absolutely.’ Pressed by a German scholar in the same way in 2017, he replied: ‘The most important mistake on our side in relations with the West was that we trusted you too much.’26
Do the Russian authorities genuinely believe all that they say about the malign intentions of Western powers? When Security Council Secretary Patrushev calls up the spectre of American ambitions to shatter the Russian Federation, is he speaking from conviction? When Putin maintains that America has been fomenting the jihadi insurgency in the North Caucasus, is this based on credible reports? He frequently accuses the Americans of stoking up trouble, recently claiming that he remonstrated with President George W. Bush about the covert support that the American administration gave to active jihadis. According to Putin, he personally handed over a list of names of CIA intelligence agents who were operating on missions to help armed terrorist groups in the Russian Federation. He has playfully added that the records of the Bush–Putin conversations must exist in files held in Washington and that, at any rate, ‘George’ would be able to remember. Putin recorded that the CIA’s response was to say that it had every right to have contacts with ‘the Opposition’ and would continue to do so.27
If we take Patrushev and Putin at face value, the Kremlin has become a depository for imagined slights and threats. Yet people who have private conversations with Russian politicians and generals find that they concede that NATO offers no direct military threat to Russia – and the proof of their sense of security in the mid-2000s was that they had moved the bulk of their armed forces from their western to their southern frontiers.28 The Kremlin leaders used to know the difference between their own rhetoric and geopolitical reality. But rhetoric, when it is repeated year after year, can turn into a credo that distorts analysis and produces serious misjudgements. It is not that the leaders are wrong to think that nations tend to pursue their own interests at the expense of the outside world. Nor are they mistaken in their belief that Russia has been regarded with deep suspicion in many countries. But in assuming the worst of America and preferring confrontation to negotiation, the Putin administration has taken this to a self-harming extreme.