ANALYZING THE WORLD FROM A RUSSOCENTRIC VIEW.
This site will be attractive and a motivational experience to those who want to learn the real image of Russia, from its history, millenary culture and its identity discourse. It is relevant that we are in the Southern Cone, where our perceptions are similar to the whole Global South, so far from the Western capitals. MARCELO MONTES
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
There was a great power that was worried about its longtime rival’s efforts to undermine it. Its leaders thought the rival power was stronger and trying to throw its weight around all over the world. In fact, this longtime rival was now interfering in places the declining state had long regarded as its own backyard. To protect this traditional sphere of influence, the worried great power had long maintained one-sided relationships with its neighbors, many of them led by corrupt and brutal oligarchs who stayed in power because they were subservient to the powerful neighbor’s whims.
But suddenly, a popular uprising toppled the corrupt leader of one of those client states, and he promptly fled the country. The leaders of the uprising seemed eager to align with the great power’s distant rival, in part because they admired the rival’s ideology and wanted to distance themselves from the neighbor that had long dominated their much-weaker country. In response, the tough-minded conservative leader of the now very worried great power ordered his government to arm rebel groups in the former client state, to prevent the new government from realigning and eventually to drive it from power.
Sound familiar? Of course it does, but the great power in this story isn’t Russia, the tough-minded leader isn’t Putin, and the troubled weak neighbor isn’t Ukraine. The great power in this story was the United States, the leader was Ronald Reagan, and unfortunate neighbor was Nicaragua.
As the 1980s began, many Americans thought Soviet power was rising and Moscow’s appetite was growing. Such fears helped put Reagan in the Oval Office and convinced the country to launch a costly military buildup.
Reagan was especially determined to stop Soviet encroachments in the Western hemisphere. The Sandinista movement in Nicaragua had just overthrown pro-American dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle and had begun cultivating close ties with Cuba. In response, the Reagan administration organized, armed, and backed the anti-Sandinista Contras.
The result? A civil war that eventually cost the lives of some 35,000 Nicaraguans. Those deaths amounted to about 2 percent of the Nicaraguan population; the equivalent percentage in this country would be more than 6 million Americans.
Reagan and the United States acted wrongly then, and Putin and Russia are acting wrongly today. But the parallels between the two cases tell you something often forgotten when high-minded moralists start complaining about “foreign aggression.” However much we may dislike it, great powers are always sensitive to political conditions on their borders and are usually willing to play hardball to protect vital interests. The collective Western failure to understand this basic fact of life is a key reason why the Ukraine crisis erupted and why it has been so hard to resolve.
Don’t get me wrong: what is happening to Ukraine is tragic, and what Putin and Russia are doing is reprehensible. But I also think it was the height of folly for leaders in the United States and Europe not to anticipate that Russia would react as it has. After all, all they really had to do was think back to U.S. policy in much of the Western hemisphere.
If anything, Moscow has more to worry about today than the United States did back in the 1980s. Nicaragua is a tiny country, with a total population smaller than New York City’s. It had hardly any military capability of its own and its potential value as a possible Soviet base was miniscule. Yet U.S. leaders saw this small, poor, weak country as a serious strategic threat, with Reagan warning that failure to overthrow the Sandinistas would leave terrorists and subversives a mere “two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas.”
Today, American officials and hard-line pundits insist NATO expansion was and is not a hostile act, and that support for Kiev poses absolutely no threat to Russia whatsoever. In this view, Putin is either deluded or dissembling when he talks about foreign dangers. Or maybe what really scares him is the possibility that Ukraine might prosper and make his own rule in Moscow look bad.
But even if this view is objectively correct, it is beside the point. It doesn’t matter if our intentions are noble and NATO or EU expansion presents no genuine threat; what matters is whether Russia’s leaders think it is a threat, or worry that it might become one in the future. If Putin and Co. do see things that way — and there’s no reason to believe they don’t — they will be willing to play a large price to keep the threat at bay.
If you’re still skeptical, think back to Ronald Reagan. If the president of the mighty United States — which had the world’s largest economy and powerful military forces stationed all over the world — was sufficiently frightened by the ragtag Sandinistas that he was willing to organize and back an illegal civil war against them, is it just barely conceivable that Putin and Medvedev and many other Russians might be just a mite concerned that a country of some 45 million people right on their border might be getting ready to realign, and bring the world’s most powerful military alliance right up to their doorstep?
But wait, you might respond: We’re the good guys in both these stories. The Sandinistas were communists, for God’s sake, and they were in cahoots with Fidel Castro and the rest of Moscow’s “Evil Empire.” By contrast, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk and the reformers in Kiev are freedom-loving, market-oriented democrats, eager to root out the corruption that has handicapped Ukraine since independence. What we did in Nicaragua was noble and necessary and therefore defensible, and so is our policy toward Ukraine, while what Putin is doing is just inhuman thuggery. Even worse, it threatens the whole idea that borders in Europe should no longer be altered by force.
I understand the temptation to see this dispute as a simple morality play — West good, Russia bad — but the problem is that moral indignation and fervent self-righteousness is not a policy. Leaving aside whether the United States is entitled to command the moral high ground after Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Libya, etc., moral outrage doesn’t alter basic strategic realities. Given geography, the local military balance, Ukraine’s internal divisions, and Russian interests, advocates of a tougher approach have yet to devise a policy response that isn’t more likely to make things worse instead of better. It is all well and good for a sensible commentator like Timothy Garton Ash to decry what is happening, and insist that Putin “must withdraw his forces and Ukraine [must] have full control of its eastern frontier”; the problem is that he has no idea how to bring this off. It isn’t a failure of Western will or resolve; the plain fact is that escalating the war in Ukraine isn’t likely to work.
To repeat: Russia’s policy is objectionable and Vladimir Putin is not a misunderstood figure who deserves our sympathy. But his conduct is not that different from the actions of venerated leaders like Ronald Reagan, when they felt vital interests were at stake. Devising a lasting solution to the Ukraine muddle requires less moralizing and more strategizing, and the place to start is by understanding what is driving Moscow’s behavior. I have no sympathy for Putin, his policies, or his regime, but understanding that his actions aren’t really that unusual wouldn’t hurt our efforts at all.
Hay acuerdo. Tras el segundo Eurogrupo en una semana y el tercero desde que Syriza ganó las elecciones en Grecia, el Gobierno del país heleno y sus socios del euro han decidido este viernes extender el programa del rescate griego —que expiraba el 28 de este mes— durante al menos cuatro meses más. La propuesta griega era, sin embargo, de seis meses. "Hay más flexibilidad, que se acordará con las autoridades griegas", ha dicho el presidente del Eurogrupo en la rueda de prensa posterior.
La reunión de los ministros de Economía de la zona euro, reunido de urgencia este viernes en Bruselas, ha anunciado un principio de acuerdo base sobre el que detallar las condiciones de la extensión del actual programa. El texto ha sido redactado por el ministro de Finanzas griego, Yanis Varoufakis, su homólogo alemán, Wolfgang Schäuble, y el presidente del Eurogrupo, Jeroen Dijsselbloem.
"Hay un acuerdo inicial sobre un texto conjunto que se presentará ahora a los demás ministros del Eurogrupo", ha anunciado un alto funcionario griego. El texto, que incluye condiciones que debe cumplir Grecia para poder acceder a una extensión de seis meses del rescate de 240.000 millones de euros, aún no ha sido detallado en profundidad pero todas las informaciones indican que "hay progresos".
El comisario de Economía, Pierre Moscovici, anunció hace unos minutos desde el centro de las mismas conversaciones en su cuenta de Twitter que se "está avanzando" (on avance, on avance, on avance...) y fuentes del Eurogrupo citadas por France Presse ya lo confirmaban: "Parece que hay un acuerdo".
Esta reunión extraordinaria de los ministros del euro comenzaba este viernes con un más tensión de la habitual hasta ahora entre las partes negociadoras, que llevan ya 26 días de desencuentros. La Comisión Europea advirtió esta mañana que no era seguro al 100% un acuerdo entre las partes para extender el programa de rescate, que expira el próximo 28 de febrero. “Queda mucho por hacer”, reconoció un portavoz del presidente Jean-Claude Juncker, que auguró un pacto “si todo el mundo es razonable”. En la misma línea se mostró el presidente del Eurogrupo, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, quien dijo que veía "muy difícil" llegar a un acuerdo con Grecia pero que estaba intentando acercar a las "principales partes implicadas [Grecia y sus acreedores del BCE, el FMI y el resto de los países de la eurozona] para llegar a un acuerdo" en la cumbre de este viernes en Bruselas.
Ese acuerdo es lo que se deberá presentar esta noche a los ministros de Economía de la eurozona y lo que se prevé asiente las bases para desatascar el diálogo entre Grecia y "las instituciones". Es decir, lo que hasta ahora se conocía como troika (Banco Central Europeo, Fondo Monetario Internacional y Comisión Europea).
El ministro de finanzas griego, Yanis Varoufakis, que llegó "optimista" a la reunión donde señaló que, a pesar de las diferencias entre los distintos países del euro —especialmente la de Alemania, quien rechazó ayer jueves la propuesta griega— quiso dejar clara su posición y afirmó creer que habrá un acuerdo. "El Gobierno griego espera encontrar a sus socios [del euro] a mitad de camino", declaró en referencia a las posiciones enfrentadas entre Grecia y el resto del Eurogrupo sobre la extensión del programa del rescate para poder acceder a más crédito.
El Banco Central Europeo (BCE) desempolva los planes de una posible salida de Grecia del euro, según ha informado el Eurogrupo esta mañana. Y ante las dudas sobre un Grexit, Michel Sapin, ministro de Finanzas francés, se ha apresurado a dejarlo fuera del debate: "La única opción es trabajar para que Atenas se sienta cómoda" entre los 19 países que comparten la moneda única. Mientras tanto, el presidente François Hollande ha sido sido contundente durante una rueda de prensa en el Elíseo junto a la canciller alemana, Angela Merkel: "Grecia está en la zona euro y debe permanecer en ella".
Los ministros de Economía de España y Grecia, durante el Eurogrupo. / Geert Vanden Wijngaert (AP)
Bruselas aseguraba ayer jueves que sin acuerdo, el próximo lunes puede llegar una sacudida en los mercados. Pero la dureza de Alemania anticipa un Eurogrupo —cuyo comienzo se ha retrasado hasta las cuatro y media de la tarde, hora y media más de lo previsto— muy complicado. “La carta de solicitud de Grecia es un paso adelante. El problema es que los ministros de la eurozona deben hacerla operativa, y eso no va a ser fácil. No deberíamos jugar con fuego”, ha explicado una fuente diplomática europea.
El representante alemán en la Comisión Europea, Günter Oettinger, acusó a Grecia de “entrar como un elefante en una tienda china” y ha augurado que no habrá acuerdo hasta la semana próxima, antes de ser desautorizado por la Comisión. El Gobierno maltés ha explicado este viernes que Alemania está dispuesta a dejar salir del euro a Grecia. En 2012, Berlín ya sopesó echar a Grecia de la UE, y la crisis del euro se recrudeció hasta que la canciller Angela Merkel desechó la idea. El propio Yanis Varoufakis, en 2012, abogaba por mantener a Grecia en el euro ante la sacudida que eso podría provocar tanto en el país mediterráneo como en la eurozona.
Una mujer protesta contra Alemania en una manifestación en Atenas. / LOUISA GOULIAMAKI (AFP)
Tanto Alexis Tsipras, el primer ministro griego, como la Comisión Europea se han mostrado esta mañana convencidos de la posibilidad de un acuerdo. Incluso los portavoces del Gobierno alemán han suavizado su postura después de las declaraciones de ayer, en las que rechazaron de plano la propuesta de Varoufakis. El escenario más probable, según las fuentes consultadas, sigue siendo un acuerdo de compromiso: Grecia ya ha cedido en la mayor parte de lo que quería el Eurogrupo, aunque algunos socios quieren aún más dureza por distintos motivos. Alemania y los acreedores están molestos con el tono de Tsipras desde su llegada al poder y no quieren que Grecia pueda considerarse un ejemplo a seguir por nadie. Los países periféricos rescatados son también severos con Grecia porque temen un contagio político. Bélgica, Holanda y los países bálticos fueron también ayer muy duros en una reunión previa al Eurogrupo, según uno de los asistentes a esa cita. Grecia espera alguna concesión por parte del Eurogrupo después de haber cedido en casi todo lo importante.
El historiador económico Barry Eichengreen, uno de los grandes expertos en crisis financieras, aseguraba hace unas semanas que una salida de Grecia del euro “sería como un Lehman Brothers al cuadrado”. Está por ver que en Bruselas se escuche la voz de los historiadores económicos.
At least 20 people were killed, including a police officer, in an attack by al Shabab fighters on a luxury hotel in the Somali capital Mogadishu, police sources said.
The Central Hotel in the heart of Mogadishu was hit by a two car bomb explosion, which was followed by heavy gunfire after attackers stormed into the building, police officers said.
Al Jazeera has learned that the deputy mayor of Mogadishu, as well as two members of parliament were killed.
A government spokesman told Al Jazeera that contrary to earlier reports, the deputy prime minister was unhurt.
Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the raid in a phone call to Al Jazeera. The group claimed it had killed more than 20 senior government officials in attack.
"We have killed more than 20 senior officials working for the apostate government. They gathered thinking they were safe from the Mujahedeen," al Shabab military operations spokesman, Abdiaziz abu Muscab told Al Jazeera.
"We hear gunshots inside. I am afraid the attackers have also gone inside the hotel," police captain Farah Abdullahi told the Reuters news agency.
Another police officer also said attackers had entered the building and that government ministers and MPs were inside the hotel when it was attacked.
January hotel attack
Friday's assault was the second on a hotel in Mogadishu in less than a month. On January 22, three Somali nationals were killed when a suicide car bomber blew himself up at the gate of a hotel housing the advance party of the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who visited the country days later. A Somali intelligence official said that the Turkish delegation of around 70 members was staying at the hotel at the time of the attack but were unharmed.
Despite major setbacks in 2014, al-Shabab continues to wage a deadly campaign against Somalia's government and remains a threat in Somalia and the East African region. The group has carried out many attacks in Somalia and in neighbouring countries, including Kenya, whose armies are part of the African Union peacekeeping mission known as AMISOM.
Al-Shabab controlled much of Mogadishu during the years 2007 to 2011, but was pushed out of Somalia's capital and other major cities by the AU forces.
¿Hacemos bien los medios en denominar a este grupo terrorista Estado Islámico? La respuesta de Haizam Amirah Fernández, del Real Instituto Elcano, es un tajante no. Según el experto, es necesario referirse a ellos como Daesh, el acrónimo del grupo en árabe. Amirah Fernández arguyó que denominar a estos terroristas Estado Islámico les da una legitimidad de la que carecen. Una autoafirmación que buscan a través de sus estudiadas piezas audiovisuales, como la última en la que se mostraba el asesinato quemado vivo en una jaula del piloto jordano Moaz al Kasasbeh. Un perfecto videoclip elaborado con un guión, planos profesionales y recursos sonoros. “Eso es noticia y les da visibilidad. El salvajismo es un medio para conseguir impacto y los están consiguiendo de forma muy exitosa”. Y lanzó un mensaje a la audiencia: “¿Cuántos de ustedes no han visto los vídeos?”.
El experto lanzó un mensaje con la intención de que cale en Occidente: “La mayoría de víctimas de ataques islámicos son musulmanes y quienes más luchan contra estos salvajes son musulmanes”.
No es una organización terrorista al uso, ni mucho menos discreta y posee una capacidad de seducir militantes nunca vista. El Estado Islámico es un grupo con un nivel de salvajismo muy elevado y un brutal poder de captación y difusión. “Tenemos que llegar a entender por qué una persona con una vida estable en un país de occidente decide marcharse a la yihad. El Estado Islámico es una marca, el dedo hacia el cielo, es un símbolo que atrae”. Las palabras son de Moussa Bourekba, investigador del CIDOB, y uno de los cinco ponentes que ayer desgranó las claves del terror de estos yihadistas en un encuentro organizado por EL PAÍS y el European Council on Foreign Relations en el Círculo de Bellas Artes y moderado por el redactor jefe de Internacional de EL PAÍS, Andrea Rizzi . Junto a él Haizam Amirah Fernández, del Real Instituto Elcano; Julien Barnes-Dacey y Mattia Toaldo, del ECFR; y Francisco Berenguer, Teniente Coronel del Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos.
Se han conseguido muchos avances a nivel militar pero ahora mismo la situación podría decirse que es de empate"
De hecho, la opción de las potencias occidentales, más allá de enviar tropas, ha sido la de formar a los militares autóctonos. “Es una manera de que no vean la llegada de efectivos extranjeros como una invasión, como una lucha Oriente-Occidente”, apuntó Francisco Berenguer, teniente coronel del Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos. “Se han conseguido muchos avances a nivel militar pero ahora mismo la situación podría decirse que es de empate. Ninguno de los dos bandos puede conseguir una victoria”. El opinión del teniente coronel, “hay que avanzar para pasar de la contención en la que nos encontramos ahora, a la derrota militar”. Aunque afirmó que esto seguramente no será posible hasta 2016 cuando haya un grueso mayor de tropas iraquíes formadas y entrenadas.
Mattia Toaldo, del ECFR, se refirió a la situación en Libia, uno de los últimos países que ha sido testigo de las atrocidades de este grupo yihadista tras la decapitación de 21 cristianos coptos egipcios. “Libia ya es peor que Irak y Somalia”, aseguró, “allí es necesaria la unidad y un gobierno realmente fuerte. Ahora el Estado no se ocupa ni de los servicios básicos ni de las fronteras”. Eso, unido a la gran cantidad de armamento que dejó la guerra civil que derrocó al dictador Gadafi en 2012, crean el perfecto caldo de cultivo para que el Estado Islámico haya emergido con fuerza primero en las ciudades pequeñas y ahora en las más grandes.
El salvajismo es un medio para conseguir impacto de forma muy exitosa"
Julien Barnes-Dacey despejó otra de las dudas que planean sobre los terroristas. ¿Quién los financia? El experto admitió que en sus orígenes sí que obtenían fondos privados provenientes de países como Turquía o Arabia Saudí, que no iban exclusivamente dirigidos al Estado Islámico. Sin embargo, y debido a su avance sobre el terreno, este grupo ha conseguido el control de numerosas estructuras de producción y refinerías que les aportan muchos recursos, todo ello unido a la extorsión a los locales y el dinero que obtienen de los rescates. Como una verdadera organización criminal.
"The problem you Americans have in dealing with us is that you think you understand us, but you don't. You look at the Chinese and you think: 'They're not like us.' You look at us Russians, and you think, 'They’re like us.' But you're wrong. We are not like you."
Over the past few years, top-ranking Russians have repeatedly delivered versions of the admonition above to American interlocutors. We’ve been told that it comes originally from Vladimir Putin. That makes sense. Putin is a former intelligence officer. And what the warning expresses, with typically Putin-esque bluntness and political incorrectness, is a maxim shared by U.S. intelligence officers: Beware of seeing false mirror images. Do not assume your adversary will think and act the same way you would in similar circumstances. You will likely misread him if you do.
Despite a new ceasefire, Russia and the West remain at risk of uncontrolled escalation over Ukraine, and in such situations little can be more dangerous than misreading your adversary. So Putin is right: Washington shouldn’t “mirror-image” him, and U.S. leaders shouldn’t assume that he will interpret events and words as they might. But one neglected question is that of how Putin interprets the United States. Has he followed his own advice—or does he assume Americans, including President Obama, will act and react as he would? Does he even care about how Americans think, what their motives and values are, how their system works? What does Vladimir Putin actually know about the U.S. and about Americans?
As it turns out, very little.
* * *
Because of his KGB history, Vladimir Putin is typically accused in U.S. media of harboring an anti-American, Cold War view of the United States, and of blaming the United States for bringing down the Soviet Union. But there is little evidence of any anti-American views in the early phases of Putin’s public life. As deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, he did not accuse the United States of destroying the Soviet Union. Instead he publicly laid blame for the collapse of the U.S.S.R. on the miscalculations of Soviet leaders and their mishandling of reforms in the 1980s. His more negative views of the United States, and its perceived threat to Russia, seem to have hardened later in the 2000s, over the course of his interactions and relationships with two American presidents: George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
There is no reliable record of Putin’s interactions with Americans or his thoughts on the United States during key phases of his life: his youth in Leningrad, his KGB service, his period in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, and his pre-presidential years in Moscow. When Putin went to Leningrad State University in the early 1970s, only a small number of American exchange students were there. But Putin did not study English, and he would have had limited opportunity to socialize with the American students outside the university. During his early KGB service in Leningrad in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States was filtered through the world of counterespionage and global developments of the time; Americans seemed dangerous and unpredictable.
The early 1980s were years of heightened Cold War confrontation. After a period of détente, the United States had again become a clear and present danger for the Soviet Union. Based on their analysis of U.S. defense budgets, global U.S. military exercises, American and NATO air probes near sensitive Soviet borders, statements by top White House and Pentagon officials, and increased operations by the CIA in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Kremlin leadership was thoroughly convinced that the United States posed a real military threat.
March 1983 brought a full-scale war scare, just after U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced the proposed development of a missile-defense system to shield the United States from a Soviet nuclear strike. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov lashed out against those plans and raised the specter of a nuclear holocaust. On March 8, 1983, Reagan made his famous “Evil Empire” speech about the dangers posed to the United States and its way of life by the Soviet Union. In September 1983, the situation deteriorated further when Soviet warplanes intercepted and shot down a civilian South Korean Airlines plane, KAL 007, in the mistaken belief that it was a U.S. spy plane.
In the Soviet Union, top leaders terrified themselves and their population with memories of World War II, and specifically of Adolf Hitler’s surprise 1941 attack on the U.S.S.R. As Benjamin Fischer, an analyst and scholar at the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, noted: “For decades after the war, Soviet leaders seemed obsessed with the lessons of 1941, which were as much visceral as intellectual in Soviet thinking about war and peace.” Andropov and his colleagues put the KGB on full alert in the early 1980s in response to the lessons they had learned from the Soviet intelligence failures of World War II. It was around that time that Putin entered the KGB Red Banner Institute in Moscow, where Soviet paranoia about the United States and fears of a nuclear war undoubtedly framed the tone and content of his instruction.
* * *
Putin was posted in Dresden, East Germany, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan began a process that would put the tensions and war scares of the early 1980s behind them. He was too low in the KGB rankings to have much interaction with any top-level espionage targets, which would have included Americans. Until he came back from Dresden in 1990 and began working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin may have never met an American in any personal context.
By contrast, his position as St. Petersburg’s deputy mayor in charge of external relations offered Putin many opportunities to interact with Americans, in a very different atmosphere from that of the 1980s. After 1991, the Soviet Union was gone, and Putin and the rest of the mayor’s team were trying to figure out how to run the city and make its economy competitive again. American and other Western politicians, as part of a U.S. effort to forge a new relationship with the Russian Federation, openly courted Putin’s boss Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin seemed to respond well to the overtures.
U.S. businesses that moved into St. Petersburg had to deal directly with Deputy Mayor Putin who, according to John Evans, the U.S. consul general in St. Petersburg at the time, was always helpful in resolving contract disputes between U.S. and Russian businesses. Within the city’s U.S. and Western business community, Putin was seen as “pro-business.” He gave no impression whatsoever of any anti-American or anti-Western views.
Putin in KGB uniform (Wikimedia)
The St. Petersburg connection also gave Putin an important entry point into the United States. In 1992, Sobchak co-chaired a bilateral commission on St. Petersburg with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It is not clear how much direct contact Putin and Kissinger had at that time. But Kissinger would become an important interlocutor for Putin when he became president later on. Putin has admitted that the source of his initial interest in Kissinger was the former secretary of state’s early career in World War II military intelligence. As a renowned scholar with an academic career and numerous books to his name, Kissinger could provide a sounding board for ideas about geopolitics. He could interpret the United States and the West for Putin. And he could explain Vladimir Putin to other influential Americans. But beyondKissinger, Putin has had few representative Americans to rely on for insights into how the U.S. political system works and how Americans and their leaders think.
The two key presidential aides in charge of overseeing critical aspects of relations between Moscow and Washington for most of the 2000s—Sergei Prikhodko and his deputy, Alexander Manzhosin—spoke English, but to our knowledge neither had any experience of living or working in the United States. Otherwise, Putin’s “go-to guys” for the United States within the Russian government and the Kremlin have been Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister and former representative to the UN in New York, who speaks fluent English, and Yury Ushakov, a personal presidential advisor and former Russian ambassador to the United States. Putin’s lack of fluency in English has limited his own ability to have direct contacts except through interpreters or others who can act as connectors and conduits. Nor has he shown any particular curiosity about America beyond its leaders and their actions.
* * *
By 1994, the U.S.S.R.’s military alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, had collapsed along with the rest of the Soviet bloc, but NATO was still going strong, and Eastern European countries were knocking on its door seeking new security arrangements. Five years later, the issue of NATO and NATO enlargement came to play a significant role in Putin’s professional life and his ascent to the presidency.
Putin was head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet successor to the KGB, when the alliance went to war in response to Yugoslav military atrocities against ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo, which was still part of Yugoslavia. The intervention took place a mere two weeks after NATO had admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The United States did not secure the usual authority from the United Nations to intervene. NATO warplanes bombed Belgrade, and NATO forces, with American troops in the lead, then moved into Kosovo to secure the territory and roll back the Yugoslav military. As Putin put it in a speech 15 years later: “It was hard to believe, even seeing it with my own eyes, that at the end of the 20th century, one of Europe’s capitals, Belgrade, was under missile attack for several weeks, and then came the real [military] intervention.”
NATO’s Kosovo campaign was a turning point for Moscow and for Putin personally. Russian officials interpreted the intervention as a means of expanding NATO’s influence in the Balkans, not as an effort to deal with a humanitarian crisis. They began to revise their previous conclusions about the prospects for cooperating with NATO as well as with the United States as the leader of the alliance. As Putin noted in a March 2014 speech, the experience left him with a rather harsh view of Americans, who, he said, “prefer in their practical politics to be guided not by international law, but by the law of force.” The Americans had, as they would on numerous occasions, “taken decisions behind our backs, presented us with accomplished facts.”
* * *
In August 1999, Putin was appointed prime minister, and his immediate concern was Chechnya, where separatist violence was spilling over the border and into the rest of Russia. The considerable high-level Western attention to, and criticism of, the second outbreak of war in the republic stoked Russian fears of NATO or U.S. intervention in the conflict. In the United States, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor in the Carter administration, and retired general Alexander Haig, a former secretary of state in the Reagan administration who had also served in top positions in the U.S. military and in NATO, helped to set up an advocacy group to demand a diplomatic solution to the war and policies to protect civilians caught in the conflict. Given the Soviet leadership’s neuralgia about officials like Brzezinski and Haig in the 1970s and 1980s, this group was viewed with alarm in Moscow. Russian political figures saw the risk of the Americans and NATO intervening in Chechnya to protect civilians, just as they had intervened in Kosovo.
Putin’s response was to write an op-ed in The New York Times in November 1999, in an early foray into international PR. He explained that Moscow had launched its military campaign in Chechnya to respond to acts of terrorism. He praised the United States for its own strikes against terrorists, noting that “when a society’s core interests are besieged by violent elements, responsible leaders must respond” and calling for the “understanding of our friends abroad.” The general message was conciliatory. Putin clearly hoped that the constructive atmosphere that had framed his interactions with Americans in St. Petersburg could be restored in some way.
After September 11, he appeared convinced that Washington would come to see things from Moscow’s perspective and would recognize linkages between al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and terrorists in Chechnya. In a press conference in Brussels on October 2, 2001, Putin asserted that terrorists took advantage of “Western institutions and Western conceptions of human rights and the protection of the civilian population ... not in order to defend Western values and Western institutions, but rather ... in a struggle against them. Their final goal is annihilation.” All states would have to clamp down politically at home, as well as improve military postures abroad, to deal with this problem. Based on Russia’s experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Putin offered the United States concrete assistance in rooting out al-Qaeda.
If Putin and the Kremlin hoped to create an international anti-terrorist coalition with Washington modeled on the U.S.-Soviet World War II alliance against Germany—one that would give Russia an equal say with the United States—that hope went unfulfilled. As Georgetown professor and former U.S. government official Angela Stent has pointed out: “When countries form partnerships forged out of exigencies such as the 9/11 attacks, the shelf life for these alliances is usually short because they have a specific and limited focus.” The U.S.-Soviet anti-Nazi alliance itself, she wrote, “began to fray as the victors disagreed about what would happen after Germany surrendered, and the Cold War began.”
In the aftermath of 9/11, Putin was mystified by the actions of his U.S. counterparts. In the absence of countervailing information, Putin initially saw American failure to respond to his warnings about the common threat of terrorism as a sign of dangerous incompetence. In a series of speeches just after September 11, Putin said he “was astonished” at the Clinton administration’s lack of reaction to his warnings of a terrorist plot brewing in Afghanistan. “I feel that I personally am to blame for what happened," he lamented. “Yes, I spoke a great deal about that threat. ... Apparently, I didn’t say enough. I didn’t find the words that could rouse people [in the U.S.] to the required system of defense.”
The 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq convinced Putin that the United States was up to no good and looking for pretexts to intervene against hostile regimes to enhance its geopolitical position. Putin and his intelligence officials knew that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was bluffing about his possession of chemical and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After the invasion of Iraq, and the U.S. failure to find any WMD, a comment attributed to Putin was passed around European diplomatic circles: “Pity about the WMD. I would have found some.” In other words, the U.S. intelligence services and government were beyond incompetent—if you’re going to use a pretext, do your homework; make sure it's a good one.
The opinion Putin and his security team seem to have formed over this period—that the United States was not just incompetent but dangerous, and intent on inflicting harm on Russia—was strikingly at odds with the conclusion in the United States that the collapse of Soviet communism meant the disappearance of the military threat from Moscow. As in the 1980s, U.S. officials had a hard time believing that Russia could genuinely see the United States as a threat. As a result, Washington made decisions that were consistently misinterpreted in Moscow—including a second major NATO enlargement in 2004.
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The color revolutions in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 further darkened Putin’s view of U.S. activities. For Moscow, Georgia was a tiny failed state, but Ukraine was a smaller version of Russia. In Putin’s view the Orange Revolution demonstrations in Ukraine in 2004, and their scale, could only have been orchestrated from the outside. This was especially the case when the color revolutions became conceptually tied to the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda” and its efforts to support the development of civil society and the conduct of free elections in Afghanistan and Iraq—two countries that the United States had invaded and occupied.
The color revolutions, Putin argued in his March 2014 speech, were not spontaneous. The West inflicted them on a whole array of countries and people. The West, Putin argued, tried to impose a set of “standards, which were in no way suitable for either the way of life, or the traditions, or the cultures of these peoples. As a result, instead of democracy and freedom—there was chaos and the outbreak of violence, a series of revolutions. The ‘Arab Spring’ was replaced by the ‘Arab Winter.’”
Russia's 2008 war with Georgia marked the end of Putin’s relationship with George W. Bush and his administration. The Obama administration came into office shortly afterward, intent on a “reset” that seemed to address Putin’s main stated desire for Russia to be approached by the United States with pragmatism on issues of mutual interest and importance. But once again, Putin and the Kremlin took their policy cues from U.S. actions rather than words.
Putin and Bush watch the sun set in Sochi, in 2008. (RIA Novosti/Reuters)
U.S. offers of modernization partnerships to boost bilateral trade and help secure Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization were combined with bilateral presidential commissions for human rights and civil-society development. The repeal of Cold War-era restrictions on U.S. trade with Russia was accompanied by the introduction of a new raft of sanctions in the form of the Sergei Magnitsky Act, which targeted a list of Russian officials who had been complicit in the death of a crusading Russian lawyer. Disagreements with the United States and NATO over interventions in the civil wars that erupted in Libya and then Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings marred U.S. and Russian cooperation on negotiating with Iran over the future of its nuclear program. Putin was especially angered by the violent death of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi at the hands of rebels who found him hiding in a drainage pipe during an attempt to flee Tripoli following NATO’s intervention in Libya. In Putin’s interpretation, the 2011-2012 Russian political protests were just part of this one long sequence of events, with the hand of the West barely concealed.
On September 11, 2013, on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Putin returned to a public format that he had not used since 1999. He again wrote an op-ed in TheNew York Times, directed at the American public and calling for U.S. caution as it contemplated a military strike on Syria. The tone was anything but conciliatory. The prose was bold, not cautious. Putin observed: “It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’”
With this op-ed, Putin effectively declared that his American education was complete.
By 2013, as the crisis in Ukraine began to unfold, Putin’s view of America had become dark indeed. As he concluded in his March 2014 speech: “Russia strived to engage in dialogue with our colleagues in the West. We constantly propose cooperation on every critical question, want to strengthen the level of trust, want our relations to be equal, open, and honest. But we have not seen reciprocal steps.” Limited by a lack of direct contacts with the United States, and driven by his perception of the threat it posed, Putin believed that he had been rebuffed or deceived at every turn by the West.
