The Key to Understanding Vladimir Putin (2)

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By John Evans, US General Consul in St. Petersburg from 1994 to 1997

Putin did not seek the presidency of Russia. He was visibly surprised to be appointed prime minister in the summer of 1999, and reportedly told Yeltsin he did not feel ready to shoulder the responsibility.

His immediate challenge was to wage what came to be known as the Second Chechen War, the first having led to an uneasy standoff. Putin waged the war with ferocity and the effort was a success, but it was preceded by one of the many episodes that have been interpreted in the West as indicating that Putin was little more than a criminal.

That was the bombing of two residential apartment buildings in Moscow, which was blamed on the Chechens and inflamed Russian public opinion against them. Western observers in the main seized on the idea that Putin had sacrificed the lives of the apartment dwellers to radicalize public opinion. I came to a different conclusion, which I put into a memorandum to Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott.

The Chechens, Sunni Muslims with a history of fiercely resisting the Russians in the 19th century, under their leader, the Imam Shamil (actually a Dagestani), as the Russian Empire subjugated the Caucasus, were a disturbing presence in European Russia in the 1990s. Chechens ran the Mercedes dealership in Petersburg, where lots of stolen vehicles changed hands, but very few if any new ones.

During the first war, they targeted me personally, on account of the position taken by the U.S. Government in support of Russia’s territorial integrity. Right after the bombings of the two apartment buildings, our Defense Attache in Moscow reported that the inhabitants of at least one of the buildings were dependents of military personnel. It seemed to me then, as now, that Vladimir Putin would never had sanctioned the sacrifice of those innocent people in pursuit of political goals. But, in my view, there was one person who just might have, and happened to have a connection to the North Caucasus: Boris Berezovsky, who was then serving as National Security Advisor to Yeltsin, or ‘the Family,’ as Yeltsin’s wife and daughter and son-in-law were then known.

The Family was concerned by the prospect of parliamentary elections scheduled for December of 1999, and by the potent alliance recently forged between Yevgeniy Primakov and the mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov. They were searching for a way of postponing the elections, and it had occurred to them that the Chechen war and attendant terrorism could provide justification for such a move. In the end, Putin’s campaign proved successful; the Chechens were brought to heel, and Yeltsin abdicated in favor of Putin on New Year’s Eve. We may never know for certain how the apartment bombings (and some strange as yet unexplained KGB activities in another building in Ryazan) came to pass, but I am convinced Putin was not the prime mover.

Comment: This is an interesting answer to the question of whether or not the September 1999 apartment bombings were a ‘false-flag terror campaign’. They could very well have been, but not in service of political ambitions on Putin’s part. We know Berezovsky’s ambitions made him a ruthless SOB, we know of his links to Western oligarchs and intelligence, and we know what happened to him after Putin came to power. But it makes sense that Berezovsky’s concern at the time was Primakov, not Putin. Primakov was an old hand, a ‘known quantity’. He had been the head of foreign intelligence, foreign minister and had only recently been fired as PM by Yeltsin. Putin was then shoe-horned into the premiership by ‘the Family’. Berezovsky apparently believed the newbie would be easy to control…

In his first term, Putin made a number of gestures to the United States that were friendly: he closed the Soviet-era intelligence-collecting station in Lourdes, Cuba; he shut down the naval facility at Cam Ranh Bay; he permitted the U.S. to operate a Northern supply route through Russian territory to resupply our forces in Afghanistan; and, although he frankly opposed the U.S. ‘war of choice’ in Iraq, he assured President Bush that Russia would not seek to undermine the U.S. effort there.

French President Chirac and German Chancellor Schroeder also opposed the U.S. action, but were less frank about it, angering Bush and prompting Condoleezza Rice to say, ‘punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia.’ As the disaster in Iraq deepened, Russian dissatisfaction with the American actions grew; in particular, there was an incident in which a convoy of Russian diplomats exiting Baghdad was inexplicably fired upon by Allied forces, causing several injuries.

It is common to ascribe America’s growing difficulties with Russia to President Putin personally, but the sources of Russian discontent predate Putin’s presidency. In particular, the bombing of Belgrade on Orthodox Easter Sunday of 1999, which caused then-Foreign Minister Primakov to do a U-turn while over the Atlantic on his way to Washington was taken as a hostile act, in addition to which it was an out-of-area action by the NATO alliance unsanctioned by the United Nations Security Council.

The course of events in the former Yugoslavia had some very dangerous moments that could have led to war, and some more encouraging ones, but the end game, in which Serbia was bereft of its ancient Kosovo province, was anathema to Moscow, which has never recognized its legality.

Perhaps the biggest source of Russian disappointment, even anger, has been NATO’s relentless expansion right up to Russia’s borders. Russians are convinced that President Bush, Secretary Baker and other Western leaders, Chancellor Kohl in particular, in their bid to persuade Gorbachev not to stand in the way of German Reunification, had promised that NATO would not extend its activities ‘one inch to the East’ if Moscow agreed to allow a united Germany to remain in the Alliance.

Now there has been a lively debate about this alleged promise, with partisans of NATO saying that there was no such promise, and if there was, it was never written down and anyway it was never officially a consensus of all NATO members. Former President Gorbachev has confirmed that it was never written down, but the historical record is clear: the West made what amounts to a gentlemen’s agreement not to expand, and then went ahead and did so, in two rounds (1999 and 2004).

Giving membership to the Baltic States, which potentially put NATO forces only eighty miles from St Petersburg, with its memories of the Siege, was risky enough (although understandable; we had never recognized them as part of the USSR), but at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in 2008, the Americans proposed that Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics, be brought in. Putin was in Bucharest for a side meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, and inveighed against the move, which was eventually checked by Germany and France, although it continued to be spoken about as an aspiration: ‘Georgia and Ukraine will become members.’ It is still part of the NATO litany, although nearly everyone realizes that ‘now is not the time.’

I will not go into the details here, but the reckless expansion of NATO to the East was very much a factor, not the only one, of course, in both the four-day war with Georgia and the conflict with Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea.

I could go on at some length describing the many things that have driven Russia into its present defensive crouch against the West and especially the United States. Our wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya), which have seriously destabilized that region; the ‘color revolutions’ (Rose in Georgia, Orange in Ukraine, Tulip in Kyrgyzstan); and, perhaps most devastating of all, the full-court press to brand Russia as an aggressor nation not included in the new European security architecture – all these things are resented by Russians. And we cannot say we were not warned. George Kennan F. wrote in 1996 that expanding NATO was a ‘strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.’ And Vladimir Putin, in his much-mocked intervention at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, gave voice to Russia’s growing concerns about Washington’s imperious ways.

One issue on which President Putin may well have exercised outsized influence, it seems to me, was in reacting to the events in Ukraine, right on the heels of the Sochi Olympics, which Putin had planned as a spectacle confirming Russia’s return to the world stage. Another may have been Georgia, especially the decision to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Putin may have seen as ‘pay-back’ for the dismemberment of Serbia.

Of course, all of these (and Crimea) are in the so-called – and so-imagined – Near Abroad, where Moscow claims special rights. While the West disputes this claim, it is not so different from France’s assertion of special responsibility for countries that were previously part of her colonial empire.

Putin’s rise to preeminent power in the Kremlin was a reversion to the norm for Russia, not a step backward on the inevitable trajectory that we in the West had imagined for her. What we need to do now is pull our collective selves together in the Euro-Atlantic community, think afresh about the challenge Russia’s alienation from us poses, and set about mending the damage, starting most urgently with Ukraine.

The election of Volodymyr Zelensky may provide an opening. Almost by definition, given the situation in Washington (and London), European leaders will have to take the lead on this. French president Emmanuel Macron has already staked out a role. We should let them do their best. We must reckon with the fact that Crimea will not return to Ukrainian jurisdiction, and that Ukraine’s joining NATO would cross a Russian red line.

Volodymyr Zelensky

Amb. Steve Pifer’s formula, ‘not now but not never,’ may provide a face-saving way out for all sides. Ukrainians and Russians themselves, with moral support from the rest of us, will have to figure out exactly what they can agree on concerning the Donbass. Is some form of federalization such an improper concept for a country so enormously diverse as Ukraine? It works for Canada, with its historically deep division, and for the United States and the Russian Federation. It ought at least to be considered.

As for Crimea, we should remember that the process of reaching the “Big Agreement” regarding Crimea was very lengthy and difficult, and it would have expired this year had it not been renounced by Poroshenko. Ukraine leased naval facilities to Russia in return for concessions involving gas; those conditions no longer exist.

Ukraine may have the upper hand in terms of international legalities and diplomatic support, but Russia holds the power cards, and physical possession is at least nine-tenths of international law. Moscow will simply refuse to discuss the question of Crimea’s return to Ukrainian jurisdiction, but Russia needs cooperation on such issues as transportation and securing the water supply, while Ukraine needs cooperation on navigation and other matters; thus there is something to talk about.

First of all, and most urgently, the armed conflict in the Donbass needs to be ended. Without a plausible diplomatic way forward, it will be hard, if not impossible, to stop the fighting. Even with such a diplomatic process in view, it may still be unattainable. Ukraine and Russia may be estranged for a generation or more.

In my view, Putin is no demon and we may have misunderstood him. That does not make him an angel. But imputing evil to Russia – or to any country – on the basis of its leader’s imagined personality is a dangerous game. Russia inherited a formidable military and diplomatic elite, has a well-developed sense of her history and role in the world, and, aside from the street theater that so captivates Western audiences, has real politics and public opinion that must be taken seriously by any leader.

Imagining, as some do, that Putin is ‘the problem,’ and that when he leaves the scene all will be well, is a naïve delusion. As the leading Russia scholar and diplomat Tom Graham once put it, ‘we don’t have a Putin problem, we have a Russia problem.’ And it is a problem in part of our own making – but blaming Putin is so much easier than reckoning with our own shortcomings.

yogaesoteric

November 4, 3019