Russia’s purpose under Putin has been to prise Europe – whether individual leaders, particular political parties, economic groupings or even whole countries – from the American embrace. Moscow has a lengthy tradition of using subversive activity to interfere in European politics. The Soviet communist leadership provided millions of rubles to organizations that might be used to further its interests: not only communist parties but also the ‘peace movement’ and the campaigns for unilateral nuclear disarmament.
At the start of his third presidential term in 2012 Vladimir Putin set the tone by feigning surprise at how the Americans were allowed to bully banks in Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris by fining them billions of dollars for alleged misdemeanours on world markets, contrasting this with how the Eurasian Economic Union was designed to act towards its member countries1 – all the while maintaining that Russia wanted harmonious links with European countries. Whereas he is often touted in the Western media as an unreconstructed Stalinist, Putin has been scathing about the Soviet policy of using massive force to impose communist states in the lands conquered by the Red Army. The result, he has acknowledged, was that the USSR acquired only involuntary allies, which was no prescription for effective joint action.2
The United States, meanwhile, was growing alarmed at the reliance of several European countries, including Germany and Italy, on Russian natural gas supplies, raising the question of whether the USSR would become able to threaten America’s NATO allies by a sudden suspension of delivery via the pipelines constructed in the 1970s if they were to follow policies damaging to the Kremlin’s interests. Such qualms did not disappear after the fall of communism in Moscow in 1991. In the rest of the decade, observers noted, Russia used fuel exports as a weapon in its early conflicts with Ukraine, even cutting off supplies to bring Kyiv into line. If this was done to Kyiv, it could be done to Berlin and Rome.
Two women, one in the US and one in Europe, had spectacular qualifications for dealing with Putin. The first was Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State from 2005, who began her academic career researching the US–Soviet arms race in the 1980s. Her grounding in the politics and military technology of the USSR, as well as her command of the Russian language, gave her an advantage in talks with a man like Putin. The two of them had discussions that sometimes turned fiery. In 2006 he lost his temper over Russia’s Georgian policy and stood up to peer down on her. Rice was ready for menacing tricks like this. Rising on her high heels, she returned his stare from a superior height.3 Putin never managed to intimidate her. On another occasion he showed his appreciation of her firmness and expertise: ‘You know us!’4 Rice left office at the end of the Bush administration in January 2009, having led the State Department during the difficult years when Putin turned Russian policy towards confrontation with America. The difficulties were about to intensify.
The second woman was Chancellor Angela Merkel – in 2015 alone she met Putin seven times and had twenty conversations by phone.5 Born in Hamburg but raised in the German Democratic Republic, she had had direct experience of East German and Soviet communist officialdom as she was growing up, and had never known a time when Russia was far from her mind. Merkel’s father, a Lutheran pastor, passed on to his daughter a commitment to remove the yoke of communism. A brilliant linguist at high school, she won her year’s Russian-speaking national Olympiad, but although she has no need for an interpreter, she keeps one by her side when talking to Russians – she once confessed to a phobia about speaking in Russian after having her bicycle stolen as a young girl by a Soviet soldier.6 Putin for his part gained fluency in German during his five years on active secret service in Dresden. The two have had frequent lively discussions. Merkel knows her own mind, and has regularly shared its contents with him. At the same time she is renowned for her readiness to listen to others, and Putin has discovered that patches of silence are not a sign of weakness. She has an acute sensitivity to the dangers of Russian expansionism, and in 2014 rebuked him for invading Crimea and making war in eastern Ukraine. As German chancellor she backed the sanctions regime initiated by the Americans.
Putin was willing to await events. Not only the FSB but the German daily press too revealed that industrial and financial lobbying was growing for Germany to accept the new geopolitical reality of Crimea as a Russian province. Merkel ignored her German critics, warning Putin again that he would pay dearly if he were to repeat his expansionist moves. Neither Russia’s nuclear weapons and tank regiments nor its importance as a fuel supplier gave her pause for thought. She refused to be bullied. Her constant refrain to Putin was that he should show greater respect for democratic procedures and the rule of law. In rejecting her advice he apparently remembered that Catherine the Great, who was born as a princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, is a heroine of Merkel’s – she has a portrait of the empress hanging on the wall in her Chancellery. Putin is said to have told her:
Imagine yourself sitting in the Kremlin and you have electors who live in Kaliningrad while there are also those who live in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski. And you have to somehow bring unity across this entire territory which is so diverse in languages, views and life-styles. You’ve got to say something to bring these people together. One of your compatriots, a truly great compatriot, was our empress. That was Catherine II. She started by wanting to bring about a rapid abolition of the feudal system (krepostnoe pravo). But then she learned about how Russia was constructed, and do you know what she did? She reinforced the rights of the landed gentry and destroyed the rights of the peasantry. There’s no other way in our country: you only need to take a step to the right or to the left, and you lose power.7
If this transcript is authentic, Putin was asking Merkel to accept that Russia required its own peculiar mode of governance.
Gerhard Schröder, Merkel’s predecessor as German chancellor, was more to Putin’s liking. Schröder had always defended Putin against charges of authoritarian rule and worked for an improvement in relations with Russia. His Russian friend’s gratitude was confirmed with the remarkable invitation from the Gazprom board in December 2005, just weeks after he left office, for him to join its Nord Stream consortium which was planning a gas pipeline to Germany – a scheme that would use a North Sea route and bypass Ukrainian and Polish territory. A barrage of criticism greeted his acceptance. Schröder was no doubt pleased about the size of his Russian salary. Putin was even happier: for the price of the German’s contract he had driven a wedge into German public opinion. Russia was recruiting a foreign statesman willing to validate Putin’s credentials as a ‘flawless democrat’, a description that Russian public figures continued to quote for years afterwards.8 But Schröder was no longer chancellor, and Putin had to deal with an annoyed Merkel, who refused to tailor her policies to Moscow’s requirements.
France seemed more promising. Though President François Hollande and his Socialist Party denounced the Crimean annexation and joined those countries applying economic sanctions, there was a degree of vacillation. The French authorities were notably lax about enforcing the travel ban on named individuals. When the then Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin arrived in Paris to address a UNESCO conference he was not stopped at Charles de Gaulle airport despite being banned from setting foot in France.9 In his address Naryshkin voiced ecstatic approval of Putin’s military action in Crimea, and hailed those few European politicians such as the French Republican parliamentarian Nadine Morano who called for a partnership with Russia. He saluted Italian political figures demanding a cancellation of economic sanctions: to Naryshkin it seemed clear the European Union had made ‘strategic mistakes’, especially in the matter of what he dismissed as ‘illegal sanctions’. Europeans, he went on, had to learn that it was pointless to try to ‘“correct” Russia’s cultural code’. No amount of ‘economic pressure and blackmail’ would ever achieve anything: the West had to cease its centuries-long attempt to ‘educate’ the East. What he understood by ‘the West’ was America and its European allies, and he accused the Americans of inheriting from Europe an assumption that they had the right to interfere at will in the Middle East. All this had to change. Rival powers, Naryshkin declared, had to appreciate the benefit of collaboration with Russia.10
Hollande, however, remained firm and cancelled France’s contract to build two Mistral-class helicopter carriers for the Russian navy, despite huge commercial and industrial pressure to complete a contract worth $1.6 billion. Tens of thousands of French jobs were at stake, he knew, and many of his own party’s supporters were likely to suffer. Nevertheless, he decided it would give the wrong signal to Moscow if it received advanced military equipment after using its armed forces to invade and annex a foreign country in breach of international law. A settlement was reached in which the French government agreed to pay financial compensation to Russia for its expenses while seeking an alternative buyer for the helicopter carriers.11
The Kremlin, meanwhile, noted the hostility of Marine Le Pen and her Front National towards the European Union. Le Pen regularly denounced what she saw as Brussels’ mishandling of France’s legitimate interests, and intimated that if elected president she might decide to withdraw her country entirely from the European Union. She also objected to the Western economic sanctions against Russia and, like Putin, blamed the West for starting a new Cold War. As the Kremlin was aware, she was in dire financial straits as she prepared to stand again for the presidency, the French banks having refused to lend to the Front National, which the political establishment had hoped would strangle the political far right. As Le Pen looked for money abroad, she found a ready listener in the First Czech-Russian Bank. Though the institution was based in the Czech Republic, its principal owners were Russian. Le Pen obtained a loan of €9 million, which would come to light when the bank subsequently ran into trouble and called in its debts. The French media was immediately interested, and in some newspapers Le Pen was denounced as a puppet of the nefarious Putin.12
This was, however, far from proof that Putin had ‘bought’ her. The European Union has a growing number of groups and organizations on the political far right who are both seeking to throw off the trammels of Brussels and genuinely respect much that Putin stands for: national sovereignty, conservative social values, the Christian faith, hostility to interference by unaccountable international bodies. There is also admiration for Putin’s style of strong leadership.
Russia’s leaders shared the commitment to conservative social values, warmed to parties that advocated the sovereign rights of nation states, and relished the chance to weaken the mortar that held the European Union together. But when they actively helped the European political far right, it was for their own reasons. A diminished European Union would increase the opportunity for a resurgent Russia to exert continental influence. The recipients of the Kremlin’s assistance are not paid stooges, but Europeans who have an alternative vision for Europe: not all of them call for withdrawal from the European Union, but any disruption they achieve is regarded with satisfaction in Moscow. Putin sees his policy as tit for tat. The European Union saw fit to try to lure Ukraine into its orbit in 2013, so Russian leaders feel free to interfere in the affairs of nations throughout the continent.
Visiting Moscow in April 2014, when Russia was under criticism for annexing Crimea, Le Pen confirmed her support for Putin, and the Kremlin quietly assisted her bid to become president in the forthcoming French election.13 In March 2017 Putin welcomed her to Moscow. While stressing that Russia would never want to interfere in the French electoral process, he had made no effort to invite any other presidential candidate, and he accorded Le Pen a magnificent reception.14 Before meeting Putin, she talked to Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin and agreed to campaign for the removal of the ban on Russia’s participation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.15 According to the official Russian transcript, it was she who raised political matters with Putin by calling for strategic as well as cultural and economic ties between the two countries. She also wanted a greater exchange of intelligence data to counteract Islamist terrorism, and trumpeted her desire to end the prohibition of visits to the European Union by Russian parliamentarians singled out by America and its allies for travel bans.16 Despite Putin’s denial that Russia was interfering in the French electoral process, he had not bargained for an Interfax news agency report in Moscow that Le Pen’s campaign was receiving finance from Russian banks. The report was quickly retracted: ‘Correction, Kremlin announces it has no information about the financing of Marine Le Pen’s election campaign by Russian banks.’17 Evidently the Kremlin was happy to pass on finance but drew the line at being seen to do so.
It was just as embarrassing for the Front National in France, and Florian Philippot, its deputy president, had to deny that Le Pen’s true purpose in going to Moscow was to seek financial help from Russian banks.18 Le Pen survived the criticisms in the press and flew back to Paris to take on Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election. She went down to a crushing defeat in the second round in May, and Putin had to revise his plan for partnership with France. Overtures were therefore made to Macron, who in May 2018 was guest of honour at the St Petersburg Economic Forum.
Where possible, Russian leaders sought actually to improve ties with European governments. The most remarkable attempt was on 8 April 2010, when Putin, prime minister at the time, attended a solemn ceremony at Katyn in western Russia to commemorate the Soviet NKVD’s murder in 1940 of four thousand captured Polish army officers, standing next to Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk as they both bowed their heads in prayer. They laid wreaths at the cemetery’s monument. An Orthodox priest conducted a requiem. In a dignified speech, Putin denounced the crimes of the Stalin period and called for improved relations with Poland, where the Katyn massacre was still a painful memory. But though he offered condolences in respect of the Polish victims, he stressed that Stalin and his associates had also carried out mass murder on Russians, and that the Russian people could not be held responsible for the slaughter at Katyn. No particular nation, he emphasized, could be blamed for the crimes of a totalitarian regime, and he expressed hopes for a rapprochement between Russians and Poles.19
Though opinion in Poland was impressed by his respectful display, its effect was marred two days later by a catastrophic accident when the plane carrying President Lech Kaczyński and dozens of Poland’s leading public figures to Russia to continue the commemorative ceremonies crashed as its pilot tried to land at Smolensk airport. There were no survivors. Many Poles speculated that the disaster was the work of Russian secret services. Russia’s spokesmen expressed sympathy for the Polish fatalities while brushing aside any conspiracy theory. Russia’s case was not helped by the refusal to release any of the remains of the plane to Polish investigators. In Poland, it was widely surmised that President Kaczyński had intended to designate the Katyn massacre an act of genocide. If so, it was speculated, Russian leaders would have taken offence at Poles stirring up a controversy when the Kremlin was trying to do the right thing. Spokesmen in Moscow argued that the debris from the crash was in any case best handled at a single site. It was also commented that Kaczyński had had a habit of harassing flight crews into taking risks in landing, and that the Smolensk weather that fateful day was undeniably hazardous.
Relations between Moscow and Warsaw worsened in the years that followed, and Russia’s official historical line lost its tone of remorse for the Poles slain at Katyn in 1940. By April 2017 Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinski felt it worth pointing out that far more Russians died at Katyn than Poles.20
While Poland relapsed from its moves toward reconciliation, Hungary surprised the rest of the world by encouraging cooperation with Russia. The USSR had imposed communism on the country after 1945 and invaded it again in 1956 when the Hungarian communist leadership pursued a campaign for a gentler form of communism than the Kremlin would accept. The bloody repression of Hungary’s revolt against Soviet oppression only deepened the hatred of Russians and things Russian. Nevertheless, prime minister Victor Orbán was open to Moscow’s approaches. He shared many of the conservative principles Putin espoused, and also resented Germany’s growing dominance in the European Union. In January 2014 he leapt at Russia’s offer of a thirty-year $14 billion loan to expand a Hungarian nuclear plant,21 the work to be done by the Rosatom company. Hungary was splitting off from the European political mainstream, even though Russian civilian technology was starting to be admired in Europe. The Kremlin did not mind the cost, even though the Russian budget was creaking, and in following years the terms were eased still further in Hungary’s interest.22
Orbán had to avoid any suspicion of rendering the country subservient to Russia. The slightest hint of secret bribes being paid would mean the political end for him. But Orbán could and did call for an end to Western economic sanctions against Russian politicians, businessmen and companies.23 At the same time Russia’s leaders understood that they had to avoid too much crowing about their success. They contented themselves with the thought that the European Union was showing growing signs of internal tensions.
When in 2015 the Hungarian government refused to admit refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war, the rift between Berlin and Budapest widened sharply. Orbán and Putin were agreed that Angela Merkel, by encouraging the influx of refugees and migrants into the European Union, had acted unwisely and peremptorily. Putin put this into a broad frame of criticism. The refugee emergency in Europe, he stated, flowed from Western policy over several years:
We actively objected to what was happening, for instance, in Iraq, Libya and several other countries. We said: you shouldn’t do that, you shouldn’t pile in there and you shouldn’t make the mistakes. Nobody listened to us! On the contrary, they thought we were taking an anti-Western position, one that was hostile to the West. And now, when you have hundreds of thousands of refugees – there are now already a million of them – how can you think that our position was either anti-Western or pro-Western?24
He was pleased to find European leaders like Orbán who declined to be browbeaten by Brussels or Berlin, but it was the United Kingdom, rather than Hungary, that voted to leave the European Union. British involvement with Brussels had had a lengthy and tormented history that prime minister David Cameron tried to resolve in June 2016 by holding a referendum. The question before the electorate was simply whether to remain or leave. After his own lacklustre campaign for ‘remaining’, but to his astonishment none the less, 52 per cent of voters chose to pull the country out. Cameron stepped down from power, being succeeded as prime minister by Theresa May, who had voted to remain in the European Union but committed her cabinet to respecting the referendum result by negotiating the country’s departure. The ensuing political crisis in both London and Brussels dwarfed every trouble emanating from Budapest. The European Union was breaking up, or at least one of its leading states was choosing to split away. Russian leaders had tried for years to produce divisions inside the EU, but never in their wildest dreams had they imagined such a result. Since 1989, with the fall of communism in eastern Europe, the continent had undergone a process of unification. The trend was suddenly in the opposite direction.
The United Kingdom had been the cause of much trouble for Russia in recent years. It had regularly backed the cause of economic sanctions against Russia and was a vehement critic of the Crimean annexation. Now Putin enjoyed his moment of schadenfreude:
The Prime Minister is only just beginning her work and there are internal questions for her to grapple with. But there was a time when Great Britain and Russia had firm, comprehensive relations, and we are ready to return to that. It is up to the British side, not to us. We’ve noted that measures have been put in motion connected with the jubilee year of the [wartime British] northern convoys [to Archangel] and that Princess Anne paid a visit.
We’ve had a lot of problems in historical periods but there were also moments which undoubtedly bound us together. We remember and know about this, and we’re ready to restore relations with Great Britain and go with them as far as they desire, but, of course, we’re not going to impose anything, and indeed we can’t. We cannot decide for them the scale of relations to be restored. Nevertheless, you see, there is something of the order of 600 companies from Great Britain in our economy and they don’t intend to leave it.25
Without laughing out loud, Putin could not have shown greater delight. An isolated European country was one Russian leaders looked forward to dealing with from a position of strength.
As British remainer politicians sought to explain their defeat, evidence emerged that Russian internet companies had disseminated propaganda to voters in favour of the leave cause. There was well-grounded speculation that the Kremlin had sponsored these efforts, and as to whether Russians had also supplied financial support for British pro-leave organizations. Russian meddling became a continuous topic of media interest. Though nobody could fairly conclude that the referendum result was entirely the product of Russia’s machinations, a degree of interference from Moscow was hard to deny.
In Montenegro Russian intervention went much further. As one of the smallest successor states to former Yugoslavia, Montenegro was notorious for corruption in public life and for organized crime. The cabinet in Podgorica was committed to seeking admission to the European Union, which led to chronic dispute and outbreaks of violence. The imbroglio reached its peak in October 2016, when the authorities accused fourteen individuals of plotting to assassinate prime minister Milo Đukanović and organize a coup d’état. Most of those charged belonged to the Montenegrin political opposition, including the pro-Russian Democratic Front, but two, accused of terrorism, were Russian citizens. All had campaigned for Montenegro to steer a course away from Brussels and towards Moscow. Allegations were made that the Russian secret services had been subsidizing the Democratic Front, and Đukanović was in no doubt that Moscow’s hand had directed the alleged conspiracy. He could not arrest the Russians, who were based in nearby Serbia and could therefore return to Russia without fear of extradition. Russian ministers in Moscow spoke with distaste of Đukanović’s desire for accession to the European Union and NATO, and accused Đukanović himself of gross financial corruption.
Đukanović got his way even after resigning as prime minister. Negotiations continued for Montenegro to join the European Union, and in April 2017 the Montenegrin parliament voted to enter NATO. Aware of the pressure that Russia was exerting, Western leaders held firm by welcoming Montenegro into the military alliance in June. In Moscow the news was met with disquiet. Not only had Russia’s political pretensions been thwarted, but Russian organized crime groups were uneasy about a future where Montenegro might soon cease to offer a haven for their activities. The Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a statement interpreting Đukanović’s success as a dangerous increase in instability in the Balkans, and Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov and his fellow Russian diplomats tried to divert attention from Putin’s objective of increasing instability in Europe.
Putin had set his face against the prospect of a unified and expanded European Union and a strengthened and extended NATO. Though he had suffered a setback in Montenegro, he could point to achievements in France and Hungary, where unease with the European Union was on the rise. The United Kingdom was on the brink of ending its membership. Even in Italy, where Russian secret services were seemingly less active, a surge of displeasure with Brussels culminated in an election in March 2018 that brought to power a coalition consisting of the right-wing League and the left-of-centre Five Star Movement, both of which campaigned for greater national freedom from the European Union’s control. Moscow was delighted.26 The League endorsed the Crimean annexation, apparently without recourse to covert Russian subsidy, and promoted the cause of Italian business investment in Crimea.27
Russian leaders in the 1990s had grown accustomed to failure and humiliation, but times had changed, and the sequence of successes and semi-successes could be celebrated. As Lavrov and Putin saw it, if history was not on their side, at least it appeared not to be against them.