Strongman (36 page)

It took until 20 January for Europe’s gas to start flowing again, following a deal struck in the middle of the night between Putin and the Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
Ukraine would pay European prices, but with a discount for 2009, and in return Ukraine left the fee it charged for transit unchanged. Both sides agreed no longer to use the shady intermediary,
Rosukrenergo, linked to Tymoshenko’s erstwhile colleague and now rival, President Yushchenko.

The postscript to this story comes a year later. In February 2010 Viktor Yanukovych, the man supported in 2004 by Putin but overthrown by the Orange Revolution, was finally elected as
Ukraine’s president. The Yushchenko presidency had proved disastrous, riven by internal rivalries, corruption and inept economic policies. Some saw it as the defeat of the Orange Revolution
– but that was short-sighted. Yanukovych beat his main rival, Tymoshenko, in a fair election, so democracy itself was not an issue. Moreover, Yanukovych in power proved to be not entirely a
Russian poodle. He did, it is true, quickly sign an agreement with President Medvedev to extend Russia’s lease on its Black Sea Fleet base in the Crimea for up to 30 years. In exchange he
extracted a multi-year discount on Ukraine’s contracts for Russian gas deliveries. But the price Russia would have to pay for its Crimean base was extortionate. Putin commented: ‘The
price we are now asked to pay is out of this world. I would be willing to eat Yanukovych and the prime minister for that sort of money. No military base in the world costs that much. Prices like
that simply do not exist. If we look at what the contract would cost us over ten years, it amounts to $40–45 billion.’

Later, Yanukovych also began to question again how much Ukraine was paying for its Russian gas. (The deal signed by Tymoshenko with Putin in 2009 was deemed so unfavourable that she was jailed
for abuse of office.) In summer 2011 Yanukovych demanded that Russia halve its prices, to less than $200. As for Ukraine’s westward orientation, although plans to join NATO were dropped,
Yanukovych continued to move towards closer integration with the EU – spurning Putin’s attempts to woo him into a free-trade agreement with Russia.

The Obama effect

In the summer and autumn of 2008, while Russia was gazing at its Georgian navel, its leadership failed to notice that on the other side of the world something important was
happening. George W. Bush, Putin’s nemesis for the past eight years, would soon stand down, and there was every chance that the November presidential election would be won by a young, liberal
black man who was enthralling the entire world. Firstly, the Russians did not believe that a black candidate could possibly beat Senator John McCain. But they also refused to believe that if Barack
Obama did win anything would change. I remember sitting in a Kremlin office trying to explain to officials that an Obama victory looked very likely and that it could present a real opportunity to
improve relations. They should start thinking now about how to reach out to him. The reaction was a smirk and a shrug of the shoulders: ‘Nothing will change. It’s all the same
people.’

Russia really was stuck in a time-warp. It was not just the West that still treated Russia as essentially a communist country minus a few of the trimmings. Russia also suffered from a world view
shaped by Cold War-era
Pravda
cartoons of Uncle Sam feeding the ‘military-industrial complex’ with one hand and launching missiles at the Soviet Union with the other. For them,
Barack Obama was just a product of the system, and nothing would change.

On 4 November Obama was elected, to a parade of delirious headlines almost everywhere. Whatever else was true, Obama was not George W. Bush, and for many people it seemed like the dawn of a new
era. President Medvedev had been preparing for his first state-of-the-nation speech for some weeks – it was first announced for late October, then rescheduled for 5 November. As news of
Obama’s victory came in, the Kremlin’s PR firm, Ketchum, quickly sent a recommendation that this was the ideal chance to make an overture to the new president, with some warm words
about future cooperation. But it was not just Ketchum’s advice that failed to get through; it was as if nobody had bothered to pass on the news that Obama had won.

Medvedev spoke for an hour and half in the dazzling white hall of the Great Kremlin Palace, but he did not even mention Obama’s name, far less congratulate him. He did, however, blame US
foreign policy for the war in Georgia, and he announced that Russia might deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, bordering Poland, to neutralise Bush’s missile defence system.

The next day’s headlines recorded a missed chance. ‘Russian President Dmitry Medvedev orders missiles deployed in Europe as world hails Obama,’ said the London
Times
.
‘Russia gives Obama brisk warning,’ said the
Washington Post
.

It has often been pointed out that Russia’s foreign policy is essentially reactive, and this was certainly largely the case throughout the Putin years. He made few, if any, initiatives off
his own bat: as we have seen, he expected NATO to ‘invite’ Russia to join, he responded to the 9/11 attacks with positive gestures, and to NATO expansion and missile defence plans with
negative ones – but he rarely came out with initiatives of his own for others to react to. The same was clearly going to be the case now: Russia’s foreign policy might change, but only
if the Americans made the first move.

Obama chose Stanford University professor Michael McFaul as his chief Russia adviser, and the new team immediately came up with a new, pragmatic philosophy which they called ‘dual-track
engagement’. It meant that the administration would not link country-to-country relations with Russian behaviour on human rights or democracy. It would continue to challenge the Kremlin
robustly on its human rights record and over its occupation of Georgia, but it would not make diplomatic or military cooperation in other areas (on Iran, for example, or missile defence) hostage to
that. The two would operate on separate tracks. ‘The idea’s very simple,’ McFaul says. ‘We’re going to engage with the Russian government on issues that are of mutual
interest and we’re going to engage directly with Russian civil society, including Russian political opposition figures, on things that we consider are important as well.’
¹

The first public hint of a new approach came in a speech by Vice-President Joe Biden at the Munich Security Conference in February 2009. This was the same venue where two years earlier Putin had
virtually turned his back on the United States. ‘The last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and members of our alliance,’ Biden said. Now, the US wanted
to ‘press the reset button’. The phrase quickly became shorthand for Obama’s new approach to Russia. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn it into a television
image a month later by presenting her opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, with a large red button marked ‘reset’. The word was unfortunately rendered into Russian as ‘overload’
or ‘overcharged’ – which at least ensured some smiles as the policy was formally inaugurated.

Behind the scenes, more important resetting was getting under way. A week after Biden’s speech, Michael McFaul went to Moscow to hand-deliver a personal letter from Obama to Medvedev. The
letter was intended to be a kind of bait, laid outside the cave to tempt the growling bear to come out. ‘We are taking a careful look at the missile defence programme,’ it said, hinting
that it should become an issue for cooperation, not confrontation. The letter laid out in big, broad terms a vision of US–Russian relations which recognised that, in fact, America’s
interests were by and large also Russia’s interests, and they should be looking for ‘win-win’ situations rather than the ‘zero-sum’ attitude that had dogged the
past.

The bear sniffed the package and seemed to like it. Medvedev had his first face-to-face meeting with Obama in London on 1 April, on the margins of a G20 summit convened to tackle the global
financial crisis. They got through the preliminaries – how nice that we’re both young, both lawyers, both new to the job – and then Obama decided to try out his new
‘win-win’ approach on a troublesome example that had recently arisen. A few months earlier, President Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan had suddenly announced he wanted the Americans to leave the
Manas air base, a vital transit centre for the Afghan war, having been leant on – and bribed – by the Russians. Bakiyev’s decision came on the same day as Russia offered
Kyrgyzstan a $2 billion loan. Sitting together in the US ambassador’s Regent’s Park residence, Obama explained to Medvedev, a trifle condescendingly, why it was in Russia’s
interest to let the Americans stay at Manas: ‘I need you to understand why we have this base here. It supports our activities in Afghanistan. It’s where our troops fly in and out of
Afghanistan. They take showers. They have hot meals and they get ready to go in to fight in Afghanistan, to deal with enemies of ours that are also enemies of yours. And if we weren’t
fighting these people, you would have to be fighting these people. So tell me, President Medvedev, why is that not in your national interest, that we would have this base of operations that helps
what we’re doing in Afghanistan?’ Medvedev did not respond immediately. But three months later the Americans signed a deal that allowed them to stay at Manas.

Michael McFaul recalls that Medvedev also made a surprising gesture at the London meeting, offering to expand the so-called ‘Northern Distribution Network’ for Afghanistan, to allow
the US to transport lethal cargoes through Russian air space for the first time.

This became a key accord to be announced during Obama’s first official visit to Moscow in July 2009, together with a framework agreement for talks to begin on a new disarmament treaty to
replace the old START nuclear arms reduction treaty, which was due to expire in December. The treaty, which would become known as New Start, was to be the centrepiece of the reset. But even
agreeing wording for the framework agreement required some diplomatic acrobatics, to accommodate the two sides’ diametrically opposed views on whether the treaty should also impose limits on
missile defences.

President Obama had promised to ‘review’ George W. Bush’s missile defence plans, and in September he would delight the Russians by cancelling the plans for a radar in the Czech
Republic and interceptors in Poland. But he still intended to build something in their place, and the Americans were determined not to include in the New Start treaty anything that would impede
their development of a missile shield. The Russians were equally determined to link the two. They insisted that building defences against offensive nuclear missiles destabilised the general
strategic balance by making the side without the shield vulnerable to a first strike.

‘We were categorical that we were not going to have this conversation together,’ says McFaul. ‘We could have a separate conversation about missile defence, but here we were
going to talk about reducing offensive strategic weapons. That’s what the negotiations had to be about. The Russians wanted to do it all together. We said no.’

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, recalls: ‘It was clear from the beginning – for us at least and I think for our American friends too – that the subject
of missile defence would become a stumbling block.’
²

They agreed a compromise, but it was a messy fudge. Their memorandum of understanding included a ‘provision on the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive
arms’. The two presidents interpreted this in quite different ways. At their joint press conference, Medvedev said: ‘We have agreed that offensive and defensive systems of both
countries should be considered
as a complex
.’ Obama said: ‘It is entirely legitimate for our discussions to talk not only about offensive weapons systems but also defensive
weapon systems.’ He did
not
say they should be ‘considered as a complex’, indeed he explicitly pointed out that America’s planned missile shield was aimed exclusively
at dealing with a strike from Iran or North Korea and had nothing to do with Russia’s strategic forces, and added: ‘And so, in that sense, we have not thought that it is appropriate to
link discussions of a missile defence system designed to deal with an entirely different threat unrelated to the kinds of robust capabilities that Russia possesses.’ So was there linkage or
not? The fudge allowed negotiations to start ... but on a fatally flawed basis.

The July summit in Moscow was designed to demonstrate the new ‘dual track’ approach, taking in not just summit talks with the Russian leadership but also ‘civil society’
– a speech at an independent college, the New Economic School, and a meeting with opposition figures, ‘the biggest critics we could find of the Russian government’, according to
McFaul.

The first day was devoted to talks with President Medvedev, but Obama was also keen to meet the man who had shaped Russia for the past ten years. The second morning began with breakfast on the
veranda at Putin’s dacha – a sumptuous meal that included three types of caviar (‘at least one of which must have been illegal’, according to one of the Americans). The
meeting was scheduled to last one hour, but went on for two and a half. Obama started by asking Putin, ‘How did we get into this mess – this low point that US–Russian relations
have been in for the past years?’ Luckily Obama is a good listener. Putin’s answer took up the whole of the first hour.

He delivered a history of the two countries’ relations, going back to his hobby horse, the West’s bombing of Serbia, and enumerating every slight he had felt in the years that
followed: ABM, Iraq, WTO, NATO expansion, missile defence, Kosovo ... Putin’s tale of unrequited love. McFaul felt that while one could argue over the substance ‘the prime minister was
actually saying things that I think President Obama also agreed with – that if we just focus on our interests and talk very pragmatically about where we agree and disagree, we can
cooperate’. For Obama, the history lesson was even rather helpful because it enabled him to emphasise to Putin: well, I’m different, I’m new, and I don’t want the past to
haunt the future. I actually want to reset the relationship with Russia.