But just as the West was disillusioned with Putin, so Putin was also becoming disillusioned with the West he’d been so keen to court.
5
NEW EUROPE, OLD EUROPE
A foot in NATO’s door
It was Tony Blair, perhaps, who best understood the ache that gnawed at Vladimir Putin’s KGB soul. The two men continued to meet regularly after the ground-breaking first visit to St Petersburg before Putin was elected. As well as formal talks they had jeans-and-shirt-sleeves get-togethers at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, and tête-à-têtes over vodka and pickled gherkins at Pivnushka, a Moscow beer hall. Blair tried to soothe the Russian’s anxieties about American plans for a missile defence shield. And behind Putin’s bluster about how Moscow would have to take counter-measures he sensed a deeper problem.
One of Blair’s aides, in an off-the-record interview, put it in terms that were so condescending they would have incensed Putin had he known this was what Blair thought: ‘The main thing Tony took away from those meetings was the need to treat them seriously. Their problem was that they felt excluded from the top table and weren’t being treated as a superpower. You had to show them respect. Even if they weren’t really a superpower any more, you had to pretend they were. This was the point Tony made to the Americans.’
To put flesh on the idea, Blair came up with a proposal to create a new NATO–Russia Council (NRC), to bind the Russians more closely to the Western alliance – stopping well short of membership, but at least giving them a sense of belonging to the club. The NRC would represent a significant upgrading of relations from the consultative ‘Permanent Joint Council’ that had existed since 1997 and given Russia zero influence over the alliance’s actions. Russia would now have a permanent ambassador at NATO headquarters, who would participate in sessions of the NRC on a par with each of the 19 other ambassadors – not ‘Russia plus NATO’, in other words, but ‘Russia plus the US, France, Britain, Germany’, and so on.
Blair’s initiative went down well in Western capitals, where it was seen as a realistic alternative to the more fanciful vision of actual NATO membership, which some, including the German chancellor, had discussed. The idea soon got hijacked by the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who had also been striking up a bond with Putin. The two men were rather similar in temperament – equally ‘blokeish’, equally vain and with a similar taste in earthy or tasteless jokes. Putin also saw in Berlusconi’s media empire some justification for his own control of Russian television.
One Friday evening early in 2002, NATO’s secretary general, George Robertson, had just got off a plane at Edinburgh airport, heading for a weekend at home in Scotland, when his mobile phone rang. It was Berlusconi. He had decided that Italy would host a special NATO summit to launch the NRC.
‘Hang on, Silvio,’ said Robertson. ‘We haven’t quite got to that point yet.’
‘No, no,’ replied Berlusconi. ‘I have spoken to Vladimir. It’s all agreed. We will host the summit – and we will pay for it.’
Robertson was not going to be pushed around. ‘You can’t just do a deal with Putin. There are 19 countries in NATO and I have to consult all of them. But we’ll take your offer into account.’1
The proposal to pay for the summit, however, was a clincher. It didn’t take long to persuade the others to let Berlusconi stage the show. And a show it was, with no expense spared. Berlusconi took a run-down air base at Pratica di Mare outside Rome and transformed it into the Roman equivalent of a Potemkin village – a palatial canvas conference centre modelled on the Colosseum, complete with ancient marble statues.
The historic agreement was duly signed on 28 May. It would allow Russian generals for the first time to have permanent offices in NATO’s headquarters. And while Russia would not be able to veto alliance decisions, it would at least take part in joint discussions about issues such as peacekeeping, regional security, search-and-rescue operations and the fight against international terrorism and nuclear proliferation. In practice, according to Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, the original idea – to give Russia a ‘real voice’ – got watered down in the NATO bureaucracy.2 Russia would later complain that NATO representatives would usually meet ahead of any Council session, coordinate their position and then effectively act as a bloc in their talks with Russia.
At the press conference after the signing ceremony, Putin said something that startled some of those present with its frankness. ‘The problem for our country,’ he said, ‘was that for a very long period of time it was Russia on one side, and on the other practically the whole of the rest of the world. And we gained nothing good from this confrontation with the rest of the world. The overwhelming majority of our citizens understand this only too well. Russia is returning to the family of civilised nations. And she needs nothing more than for her voice to be heard, and for her national interests to be taken into account.’
His words were so powerful that Robertson remembered them and could almost recite them from memory nine years later. ‘That seemed to me to be quite a dramatic appraisal, a confession, by a Russian leader about the years of failure and what he aimed to do in the future.’
Putin’s statement also confirmed exactly what Blair had understood about his craving for respect. But there were many in the West who looked at what was going on inside Russia and refused to believe that she really was a repentant daughter ‘returning to the family of civilised nations’.
Just what do we think of Russia?
Within the Bush administration there were two diametrically opposed views of what to do about Russia – plus many shades of opinion in between. Those, like national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who spoke Russian and had a background in Soviet studies, were not necessarily the best disposed towards the new Russia. Several of Putin’s advisers have described her to me as ‘a Soviet expert, not a Russia expert’. They felt that she still viewed Russia through red-tinted spectacles. She took a tough line on Russia’s aggression in Chechnya, and an even tougher line on any Russian interference in neighbouring countries, which she took to be a sign of post-Soviet recidivism – but nonetheless she did try to understand the underlying causes of Russian policies.
Some of the Russia experts in the administration argued that there was not enough consideration of where Russia was coming from, that you couldn’t expect it to become ‘Westernised’ overnight (or perhaps at all), and that the way to win Putin round was to understand his fears (the Blair view) and accept that Russia had a legitimate right to expect its voice to be heard and its interests to be taken into account. This view was represented most strongly at the highest level by Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to one insider, speaking off the record, President Bush himself, having developed a real friendship with Putin, tilted in that direction, but policy tended to be shaped more by those who simply did not trust Russia, the so-called ‘neo-cons’ such as Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Under-Secretary of State John Bolton, Dan Fried, who handled European and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council, and Nick Burns, US ambassador to NATO (and later under-secretary of state). Somewhere between the two camps were national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley.