The Ukraine crisis put on ice the slim chance of entente between Putin and Obama, and the freeze seemed likely to last for decades beyond Obama’s time in office. The two leaders had never got on well: they stiffened in each other’s presence. Each felt he had tried his best to improve relations, only to come up against a brick wall. Of the two, Putin had always been the more difficult to please. For years before he returned to the presidency in 2012 he had been obsessed with America’s handling of Russia, and that preoccupation reached a peak during his 2011–12 electoral campaign.
The American and German leaderships had an obvious preference for Medvedev as president, and would have liked him rather than Putin to have stood again. Chancellor Merkel’s demeanour made this unmistakable.1 In March 2011 Vice-President Joe Biden came close to voicing his desired choice on a visit to Moscow when he met leading figures of the Russian Opposition.2 He reportedly told people that he had ‘looked into Putin’s eyes and saw no soul’ – a negative echo of George W. Bush’s initial approval of Putin in 2001. At a reception in the United States embassy at Spaso House Biden hinted that he hoped for a Medvedev victory.3 In May the same year, the Obama administration nominated the political scientist Michael McFaul to the Moscow embassy. McFaul, a Russian speaker, was a leading advocate of a ‘reset’ in American policy on Russia, in the direction of increasing dialogue and resolving matters that had become divisive. But he had also been active in encouraging democratic movements in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, and Putin would soon regard his appointment as a hostile measure on Obama’s part.4
Putin was angrier still when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let rip about the severity of the police in breaking up Moscow street protests against the cheating by the authorities in the December 2011 Duma elections. ‘Putin is a thief!’ demonstrators had yelled, and ‘Russia without Putin!’ Clinton issued her objection while on a visit to Lithuania, in a speech at the ‘Civil Society Meet and Greet’ in Vilnius’s Tolerance Centre on the need for governments to be held accountable. She criticized rulers who looked on civil society and its organizations ‘as adversaries instead of partners’. Clinton talked of the ‘flawed Duma election’ in Russia, and criticized the official interference with impartial electoral monitoring. ‘So for us,’ she declared, without naming Putin, ‘it is just an article of faith that democracy is not only about elections; but in the absence of free, fair, transparent elections, it’s hard for democracy to be sustained.’5
On 8 December, two days after her speech, Putin felt stung into replying. Clinton had given her assessment of the Duma electoral process, he said, without waiting for reports by valid international observers. He charged the American with pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a hostile propaganda campaign.6 He was exaggerating America’s efforts, and anyway it was Clinton’s speech, not American external finance, that had annoyed him. When she later tried to understand the source of his anger, she guessed that he objected to her making trouble for him in Vilnius, whereas he would never travel to Mexico City to revile Obama. Probably, she thought, he had asked himself: if the United States wanted a ‘reset’, why was Obama permitting his secretary of state to shoot her mouth off?7
Putin had his own presidential campaign on his mind. The Moscow demonstrations were the biggest since the early 1990s, and the anti-Putin surge in Russia continued after Putin’s election in March 2012, culminating in a huge demonstration a week before he was inaugurated for his third presidential term in May. Police arrested Opposition leaders Nemtsov and Navalny, who had headed the protests. This was six months before Obama secured his second and last term of office.
Russian leaders never forgave the political interventions by Obama’s team in what they saw as their privileged zone of influence. A tape of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in conversation with Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt soon came to light in which she discussed the composition of a future Ukrainian government. Nuland briskly rejected talk of ex-boxer Vitali Klichko holding a cabinet post: ‘I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s a good idea.’ To the Kremlin leadership this was definitive proof of American meddling.8 It was this kind of thinking that in February 2014 nudged Putin over the brink into armed action. By conventional standards of international diplomacy, Nuland’s presence and activity in central Kyiv was a grandstanding performance that encouraged the protesters at a critical moment when Yanukovych was struggling for his survival. It is not known whether Obama had authorized the State Department’s initiative. But Putin judged things by what was happening on the streets of Ukraine. He was angry that American officials felt free to incite trouble for Yanukovych which could redound to the Kremlin’s discomfort.
Resentment of Washington has come to guide all Putin’s thinking. He repeatedly put on record his contention that there is a single power in the world menacing Russian interests. Though he has castigated the United Kingdom for its action against Russian leaders and intelligence agencies, it is the Americans who are his supreme fixation: he has yet to object publicly to the behaviour of China, Saudi Arabia or even Germany – all are countries that have directly thwarted Russia economically or diplomatically. He handles his problems with them in private and judges every step in Russian foreign policy by what he may gain or lose in regard to the American administration.
Putin has emphasized how hard it is to effect change in American public life. Having observed several American national elections, he concluded that there is always pressure for candidates to adopt a militant anti-Russian stance: politicians who seek endorsement from their political parties find it advantageous to condemn the Kremlin leadership.9 Take Obama, he explained in an interview for France’s Figaro magazine:
a forward-thinking man, a liberal, a democrat. Did he not pledge to shut down Guantanamo before his election? But did he do it? No, he did not. And may I ask why not? Did he not want to do it? He wanted to, I am sure he did, but it did not work out. He sincerely wanted to do it, but did not succeed, since it turned out to be very complicated.10
When Obama left the White House, scores of alleged jihadis remained behind bars at the Cuban military base without trial. Putin saw this as an object lesson in the limits of presidential power in the American political system.11
In March 2012 Obama had tried to dispel mutual distrust by confiding in Medvedev – still Russian president at the time – at their encounter in Seoul. Neither was aware before the start of their press conference that nearby microphones could pick up their conversation. It was a mistake that provided insight into the manoeuvres that take place out of public hearing:
Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defence, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space.
Medvedev: Yes, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you . . .
Obama: This is my last election. After my election I [shall] have more flexibility.
Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.12
Obama wanted Putin to understand that, regardless of what he had to say as a presidential contender, he remained desirous of a deal with Russia on the matters causing tension. The 2009 reset had run into difficulties, but should be saved and reactivated. Obama had achieved progress with Medvedev. He wanted to avoid warmth turning to frost when Putin re-entered the Kremlin as president.
Putin felt the need to keep up his guard. Mitt Romney, who won the Republican Party’s nomination to fight Obama, called Russia the ‘number one geopolitical foe’.13 But Romney’s defeated rival, John McCain, was no less severe about Putin, charging Obama with showing dangerous weakness – and was later to argue that Obama’s foreign policy had the effect of tempting Putin to engage in his armed adventures in Ukraine.14 Though Putin expected to be a butt of criticism during the United States hustings, he was disconcerted by the way American policy continued to develop. On the one hand, the Jackson– Vanik Amendment, which the US Congress had passed in 1974 to restrict trade with countries such as the USSR with a bad record on human rights, was repealed in December 2012 and Obama endorsed Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization. But with many Congressmen and Senators remaining uneasy about Russia, they passed the Magnitsky Act, which levelled sanctions against those responsible for the death of Bill Browder’s Russian lawyer, as part of the legislation to repeal the Jackson–Vanik Amendment. The immediate response from Russia was a Duma decree prohibiting Americans from adopting Russian children. A list was compiled of American officials to be banned from travelling to Russia.
The Americans also became aware that the Russians had begun to infringe the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. In 2007 Putin had announced his dissatisfaction with the obligations it imposed. By 2014, as the international crisis deepened over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Washington issued formal notification of Russian breaches, including the development and deployment of cruise missiles with the geographical range that was banned by the treaty. For Moscow, the criticism was unfair, because it took no account of the countries in Asia that were acquiring weaponry Russia’s defences had to match. Meanwhile, Russian spokesmen indicated, American arrangements for the installation of the controversial missile defence system were still going ahead in Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania. The Russians also asserted that American military drones, which had not existed in the 1980s, constituted a violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Obama, in Putin’s eyes, had always been part of the problem. Though he had signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and reduced expenditure on American armed forces, he followed Reagan in approving a massive modernization programme for all types of weaponry, and planning new missile and delivery systems. Since the last years of the twentieth century American armaments had aged; Obama resolved to change all that. A stupendous outlay of $1 trillion was guaranteed for the period through to the year 2040.15 Attention was also given to cyber-warfare preparations. Presidential orders were issued for a newly established Cybercommand to start work in 2010.16 The Pentagon’s budget swelled. Whereas its research and experimental contract operations in 2014 were a mere half of what Microsoft spent that year, there could be no doubt about America’s commitment to remaining ahead of its potential enemies.17 When Obama left the White House in January 2017, he had cut America’s defence finances in absolute terms, but the United States continued to account for two-fifths of the entire world’s military expenditure. In truth there was only a single superpower.18
Experience has inoculated Putin against disappointment in American leaders. He is insouciant, at least in public: ‘Presidents come and go, and even parties arrive in and then leave power. But the main policy track does not change. So by and large we don’t care who will be at the helm in the United States. We have a rough idea of what is going to happen.’19
Putin’s phlegmatic recommendation is that Russian leaders act on the assumption of no great improvement in relations with the United States, regardless of who occupies the White House. He describes it as ‘a curious thing’ to which he has simply had to adapt.20
It has been his habit, when talking to American politicians and diplomats, to single out the CIA and the Defense Department as the main perpetrators of hostile actions against Russia as it goes about pursuing what he sees as its national interests.21 He avoids giving the impression of personal rancour and on occasion still refers to America as Russia’s ‘partner’. Such are his contradictions that he warns against those who seek to ‘demonize’ George W. Bush.22 He called Obama ‘my colleague’ and described him as a thinking person.23 His desire is to come across as a courteous, thoughtful leader who gives others the benefit of the doubt. When he wants, he can appear as the voice of reason.
In 2008 Putin had been irritated when the newly elected Obama assured him it was no longer American policy to rampage around the world seeking ‘regime change’. Obama found it difficult to persuade him of his sincerity, and after the United States intervened in the Libyan turmoil in 2011, Putin told Obama his own doubts about a transformed American foreign policy were vindicated.24 The press in Russia and America could not fail to notice how grim they both looked in June 2013 sitting together at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland. By autumn the same year Obama decided to cancel a scheduled meeting after Putin granted political asylum to the American IT consultant Edward Snowden, who had published thousands of classified documents before fleeing the United States.25 After Crimea, they talked by phone but seldom met. An exception was their encounter in September 2015 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, where they discussed difficult matters including Ukraine and Syria. But the icy relations between Washington and Moscow never thawed, even at the edges. Neither president invited the other to his capital. There was no summit meeting. Obama regarded Putin as a lost cause, and Putin reciprocated.
When the dangers of military escalation were all too obvious, however, neither of them could afford to let relations unravel completely. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton’s successor as US Secretary of State from 2012, made several trips to Russia, his mission to convince the Kremlin that America was seriously interested in improving the international atmosphere. Putin received him grudgingly, and the exchanges were formal and lacking earlier pleasantries. As was Putin’s habit with American secretaries of state, he kept Kerry waiting for scheduled meetings – on one occasion the delay stretched to four hours. This habitual discourtesy was a deliberate attempt to let the Americans know that Russia was a power to be reckoned with.26 But it was also a pathetic gesture. If this was Putin’s only way of inflicting pain on Washington, Russian power was evidently weaker than he wanted others to believe. At any rate, Kerry reacted with consummate self-control, showing that Putin’s ploys were too blatant to deserve a response. Although Kerry had his problems with Putin, direct communication between Washington and Moscow never ceased. In the first five months of 2016 Lavrov spoke to Kerry more than thirty times and met him for talks on four occasions.27
Only one eminent American was treated with good manners. This was President Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who defied age and the conventional wisdom of American foreign policy after Crimea by urging policy-makers in Washington to show an understanding of Russia’s legitimate regional interests. Kissinger was accustomed to a warm welcome on his Moscow visits. As the coarchitect of President Nixon’s policy of détente with the USSR in the 1970s, he continued to urge Americans to show some ‘realism’ about Russia in the world of the twenty-first century: music to Russian ears. Lavrov purred his name in a reverent tone.28 Kissinger argued that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country, but he balanced this with the statement that Russia should not ‘force Ukraine into a satellite status’, and added that Putin should beware of bringing back a situation like the Cold War. In Kissinger’s opinion, Ukraine had the right to makes its own choice of an economic and political association with the European Union and Russia should accept this. He advised, however, against admitting Ukraine into NATO membership, arguing that the Ukrainians should aim to achieve the kind of relationship with Russia that Finland possessed. And even Kissinger was adamant that Crimea should be handed back to Ukraine.29
In 2013 he was awarded an honorary professorship from Russia’s Diplomatic Academy – he ruefully told Putin that kind words from him did him no favours in America.30 Kissinger continued his quest for conciliation between the two countries. Though his Washington Post article on 5 March 2014 required concessions from Moscow, his desire for rapprochement meant that Putin was enthusiastic about meeting him – and Putin refrained from his usual trick of keeping a visitor waiting.31 In June 2017 Kissinger talked to Putin in Moscow for two whole hours. It was the twenty-eighth time that he and Putin had held a discussion.32
The Crimean annexation hardened Obama’s Russian policy. Without issuing threats, he wanted Putin to know that Russia was going to pay a price for its gross infringement of Ukrainian sovereignty.33 But Obama was more cautious in public, and applied economic sanctions without flights of rhetoric. Yet he used turns of phrase that he knew would give offence to Putin. At the international nuclear security summit in The Hague in March 2014, he casually referred to Russia as ‘a regional power’. As former Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski remarked, nothing was more likely to cause annoyance in Moscow. Not that this discouraged Brzezinski from scoffing that the Russians had to have Ukraine if they were to become even a regional power again. Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov managed to affect a verbal shrug when recalling this in January 2017.34 But Putin took it as an affront. In an interview with Germany’s Bild magazine two years later he was still indignant:
If there’s talk of Russia as a regional power, it’s necessary to start by defining what region is being spoken of. We need to look at the map and say, ‘What’s this, the European part? Or is it the eastern part where we have as our neighbours Japan and the United States, if we keep Alaska in mind, and China? Is it the Asian part? Or perhaps the southern part? Or should we look north? Essentially, in the north we border on Canada over the Arctic Ocean. Or in the south? Where, then? What region are we speaking about?35
Putin’s conclusion laid bare his sore feelings:
I think that arguments about other countries – the attempt to talk of other countries in a demeaning manner – is the reverse side of the coin from trying to demonstrate one’s exceptionalism. This seems to me a mistaken position.36
He was never one to take an insult lying down.
Mostly, however, Putin preferred to use non-inflammatory language – it was his way of dealing with the Americans that he tried to mask it when the blows hurt. But he could not resist occasional jibes. In December 2014, fed up with criticism about the seizure of Crimea, he noted the widespread conviction in the US that it had been ‘fair to snatch Texas from Mexico’.37 Interestingly, he avoided naming the United States as the snatcher: he had made his point clearly enough. Equally significant was that an event in the mid-nineteenth century was being adduced to validate current practice. Putin was trying to show that he could continue to punch for as long as opponents were confronting him, while at the same trying to avoid making a bad situation worse. This was the style of the entire Kremlin elite: leave it to others lower down the hierarchy of public life to issue the direst warnings. At a conference of retired Russian and American commanders in March 2015, the Russians said if NATO should ever attempt to recover Crimea there would be a Third World War.38
Putin likes people to think he feels calm when handling relations with the United States, saying of the Obama presidency:
I do not think that the United States is a threat to us. I think that, to use a hackneyed term, the ruling establishment’s policies are misguided. I believe that these policies are not in our interests and undermine trust in the United States, and in this sense they damage the United States’ own interests by eroding confidence in the country as a global economic and political leader.39
and poking fun at the overreaching nature of American ambition:
Essentially, the unipolar world is simply a means of justifying dictatorship over people and countries. The unipolar world turned out too uncomfortable, heavy and unmanageable a burden even for the self-proclaimed leader.40
Putin’s insouciance is a pretence. To both himself and Security Council Secretary Patrushev it was manifest that America and its allies thought the Cold War was far from over.41 As usual Patrushev could be relied upon to gloss Putin’s thinking in the sharpest terms:
The leadership of the USA has set itself the objective of world domination. In this connection, they have no need for a strong Russia. On the contrary they need to weaken our country to the maximum extent. They don’t rule out the achievement of this aim even through the break-up of the Russian Federation. This will open access to the United States to the richest resources which Russia in their opinion undeservedly has at its disposal . . . Washington thinks that it can, whenever it wants, fulfil the role of catalyst in this process.42
America, in this analysis, was bent on finding any pretext to do Russia harm. Russia, the Russian leadership seemed to believe, would have suffered punishment, in the form of economic sanctions or geopolitical encroachment, regardless of what it decided to do in Crimea.
While Obama was in office, Putin maintained his resentment and suspicion and focused on how to give grief to the American administration. Moscow and Washington screamed at each other like vengeful hawks, and the prospects of reconciliation appeared negligible. But everything changed when the unexpected happened in the course of the 2016 American presidential campaign and one unfancied Republican candidate swam against the stream of conventional wisdom by heaping praise on Putin and saying, ‘I think I’ll be able to get along with him.’43