For the Record

by David Cameron

  When I finally met Putin one-on-one at the end of the G20, I raised the issue of gay rights. It was our iciest encounter yet. He said that Russia’s problem was a declining population, and he needed men to marry women and have lots of children.

  Although our relationship was in decline, we could still speak informally and he still took my calls. Which was fortunate, because I was to call him two days after the invasion (and three more times after it). I didn’t need to ask about his motivation. It was clear that Russia feared the Western sphere of influence, in the form of the EU and, above all, NATO. And Putin was driven by a deep desire for Russian nationhood.

  Now that Ukraine’s puppet president was gone, a weak and divided neighbour was better than an entire and Western-inclined one. So Russia had resorted to causing chaos in the country. That’s why, as well as seizing Crimea, it was simultaneously stoking the unrest in the pro-Yanukovych eastern region of Donbass.

  The West had given Putin an inch by letting him make his initial moves, and now he was taking a mile – indeed, several thousand square miles. He might not wish to play by the international rules, but he certainly knew them: like Georgia, Ukraine wasn’t a member of NATO, so it wouldn’t be forced to retaliate.

  I tried to persuade him that there was a way of negotiating a peaceful outcome, respecting Russia’s interests in Ukraine. ‘We are having a referendum to see if Scotland wants to stay in the United Kingdom,’ I said. ‘You can have a referendum on Crimea’s membership of Russia, but it’s got to be fair and legal. What you’ve done is basically subvert the territorial integrity of another nation state.’ But he just didn’t accept that. It was as if we were sitting at the same chessboard but playing two completely different games.

  Putin said the new Ukrainian government was illegitimate. He said fascists and nationalists were attacking Russians in eastern Ukraine, and the separatists had nothing to do with Russia. In fact our intelligence estimated that 60 per cent of these military forces were Russians, paid by Russia.

  For Putin, lying was an art form. Long before the term ‘fake news’ was coined, Russia had mastered the concept, piping the same spurious line over the internet and across the airwaves, including via a slick new twenty-four-hour English-language news channel called RT (previously Russia Today) – a Pravda for the twenty-first century. Add that to everything else it was doing – training Russian paramilitaries in eastern Ukraine, bribing and intimidating those in rebel-held areas, supporting pro-Russian breakaway states – and we were firmly in the territory of ‘hybrid warfare’.

  The only thing that was missing was a fake election. That was duly added five days after my final phone call with Putin, when, in a hastily organised referendum, 96 per cent of the Crimean people apparently voted in favour of joining Russia. It was now unlikely the peninsula would ever be returned to Ukraine.

  William sent me a note setting out the magnitude of the situation. ‘This is the most serious foreign policy crisis in Europe since the breakup of Yugoslavia,’ he wrote. ‘To fail to respond would legitimise Russian actions in Crimea and undermine the credibility of the West and the international system. And the world is watching.’

  The answer could never be military action. Obama told me over the phone that it was obvious Russia cared more about maintaining its presence in Ukraine than we did, so we shouldn’t pretend we were willing to deploy force. Of course he was right. Given the dangers, there would have been no backing for military intervention. I never considered sending our tanks into Ukraine to face Russia’s, or positioning a naval taskforce in the Black Sea.

  We might not be able to push Putin out of Ukraine’s territory militarily, but we could do the next best thing. I saw huge value in a strong diplomatic, sanctions-led response – and, in time, I could see the argument for helping to strengthen Ukraine’s armed forces. My mantra became ‘de-escalate and deter’.

  I resolved to lead the European response. On 6 March there was an emergency meeting of the European Council on the Ukraine crisis. Herman Van Rompuy was set to issue a lame set of conclusions, so I called a pre-meeting of the Germans, French, Poles and Italians in my room before the main meeting. I got them to agree a process for now, and for if things got worse.

  This put some people’s backs up; nobody who is excluded likes a caucus of states. But it did put Britain in the driving seat of the response. Like the sanctions against Iran, it was one of the examples I’d give during the referendum campaign of Britain using the EU to lead global events.

  Unfortunately, my resolve to punish Russia for its actions was matched in some cases by my fellow leaders’ reluctance. François Hollande reportedly wanted sanctions to be ‘financial, targeted and quick’ – he didn’t want anything to block the sale of two amphibious assault ships to Russia. Germany, where a good part of the political establishment favoured ‘Ostpolitik’, or accommodation with Russia, was also being cautious. Italy, partly reliant on Russian gas, had been a traditional ally of Russia, and was nervous about backing robust action.

  Most of the international institutions were, however, responding robustly. The G8, led by the UK, suspended Russia, becoming the G7. The UN passed a non-binding resolution dismissing the Crimean referendum. NATO suspended civilian and military cooperation with Russia.

  But anyone who still thought this was a distant issue – another country’s problem – was about to be proved wrong. In this small world, no war is distant, and no country immune from its belligerents.

  On 17 July 2014, 298 people – Dutch, Australian, British, German, Belgian, Malaysian, Indonesian and others – boarded a regular commercial flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. That Malaysian Airlines plane crashed to earth in Ukraine. Everyone on board was killed.

  It soon became clear that this had been the work of a surface-to-air missile, launched by a Russian-made Buk system and operated by Russian-backed rebels. It was totally tragic, and absolutely despicable. I spoke to Putin soon afterwards. Again, it was like talking to a brick wall. ‘Hundreds of people just died,’ I said. ‘Nothing to do with us,’ was his icy reply.

  In the overused but often accurate phrase, while the truth was getting its boots on, Putin’s big lie made it halfway around the world. Russia’s disinformation – that the whole conflict was Ukraine’s fault, that Crimea was legitimately part of Russia, that Ukraine was overrun with fascist thugs – seemed to be more effective than information put out by the EU and NATO.

  In an effort to move my fellow European leaders I set out my frustrations in an article for the Sunday Times: ‘For too long there has been a reluctance on the part of too many European countries to face up to the implications of what is happening in eastern Ukraine,’ I wrote. ‘Sitting around the European Council table on Wednesday evening I saw that reluctance at work again.’ And then what I thought was at the heart of the reluctance: ‘We sometimes behave as if we need Russia more than Russia needs us.’

  A few days later the leaders came around to a new set of sanctions on Russia, including banning some of Putin’s cronies from EU countries and stopping them accessing the money and property they held there. We also imposed an arms embargo (the French eventually agreed to forgo the sale of their warships). And then, a week later, Hollande, Merkel, Italy’s Matteo Renzi, Obama and I agreed further trade sanctions, including restrictions on Russian banks’ access to our financial markets, which would undoubtedly damage the Russian economy.

  At last we were on the right track to deter Putin, even though the EU had yet to wield the really big economic sticks by cutting down or off Russian oil and trade. But what about the de-escalation? Here we made a mistake. By late August the Donbass rebels were losing territory to the Ukrainian army. We should have persuaded Kiev not to provoke Russia further. By continuing the offensive, it did just that. They could not beat Putin’s forces; we would not come and help them. By the end of the year there were 10,000 Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, as well a
s more than double that number holding Crimea. Ukrainian losses mounted, its troops were pushed back, and by the time negotiations to achieve a political settlement began they were firmly on the back foot.

  I met Putin again at the G20 in September 2014, in the rather warmer climes of Brisbane. Yet things between us were as frosty as ever. I thought about all that had happened since his St Petersburg summit. 2014 was meant to be Putin’s year. The Winter Olympics; a Grand Prix, the first in Russia since 1915; the G8 – a real chance to come in from the cold, and into a world of cooperation and compromise. But the lure of zero-sum, narrowly defined nationalism had been too strong. Putin even, rather absurdly, stationed four Russian military ships off the coast of Australia during the summit.

  Over the following months and years, Russian jets would frequently be detected flying sorties over the Baltic, and even near UK airspace. I would receive notes saying the RAF had had to scramble Typhoons as Russian planes had been spotted off the Aberdeenshire coast.

  As well as micro acts of aggression, Russia’s serious crimes continued. Undermining the hard-won peace in the Balkans. Facilitating corruption in its sphere of influence. Propping up Assad in Syria. Meddling in the US elections and, to a lesser extent, the EU referendum. Poisoning a former Russian agent and his daughter on the streets of Salisbury – later causing the death of a woman who was totally unconnected to them. More Russian collateral damage. Meanwhile, any semblance of a UK relationship with Russia is firmly, perhaps indefinitely, on ice.

  I was sceptical when originally asked whether the UK should host the 2014 NATO summit, wondering if there would be a substantial enough agenda to make the time and expense worthwhile. But after the success of the G8 in June 2013, and the disaster of the Syria vote in August 2013, and Russia’s attack on the rules-based international order, I saw that there were many things it could help us deliver – above all demonstrating the unity and resolve of the Western democracies.

  So I announced in September that we would be hosting the summit of twenty-eight NATO leaders, just one year on from the G8. It would also include the fifty nations that had taken part in the Afghanistan mission, making it the largest summit to be held in the UK for decades. I decided it would take place in Wales, at the Celtic Manor golf resort near Cardiff.

  There were so many crises unfolding around the world that one commentator went so far as to opine that the summit would be ‘the most important one since the fall of the Berlin Wall’. But the spotlight would be on NATO’s conspicuous absence in the Ukraine crisis up to mid-2014. The country itself might not have been in NATO, but the crisis clearly impacted on NATO interests, because it attacked the idea of self-determination and was a blow against liberal democracy in Europe. One of the aims of the summit was to firmly discourage the Ukrainians from thinking that NATO was about to ride to their rescue. My briefing pack even stated that a key objective of the Ukraine working session was to encourage the country’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, to ‘face the reality that Ukraine can’t win militarily’.

  The spotlight would also be on NATO itself. Just as the international rules-based system was being challenged, so were the institutions that upheld it. The alliance had played a vital role in keeping the peace in Europe. You didn’t have to go as far, or be as frank, as Churchill’s chief military assistant ‘Pug’ Ismay, who had said that NATO was necessary to ‘keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down’, to see its utility. After seventy years without a major conflict in Europe, except of course in the Balkans, it could claim to be one of the most successful military alliances in history. I supported its continued existence as a self-confident defender of liberty.

  While the pattern of threats was changing, I believed NATO was capable of adapting, and that it should remain the cornerstone of our collective security. Like almost all of the international organisations I came across, the closer you got the more concerned you became about waste, bureaucracy, political agendas and sclerotic decision-making. But you also saw the utility in being at the table.

  So, for the second year in a row I welcomed the world – two hundred presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and defence chiefs – this time to a golf course in Wales. We scattered the fairways with tanks, planes and armoured vehicles, all showing off the best of British. A full-sized model Typhoon parked in front of the hotel entrance made it pretty clear that we were there to talk security, not work on our golf handicaps.

  We had to erect marquees for extra meeting space. The Americans’ helicopters hovered so low that the leaders could barely hear each other speak. As one thundered overhead particularly noisily, I remember Merkel texting me – so often over the years I’d catch her eye across the table after she’d sent a mischievous message – asking if I was trying to remind her of the Second World War.

  I had spent time and effort in the preceding months with the NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen to hammer out the agenda. We saw eye to eye on how NATO needed to change.

  On terror, it had acted in Afghanistan, but this seemed too much of a one-off. We needed to do more to strengthen the defences of countries at risk, so we agreed security-sector assistance to training missions in other countries.

  On Europe, the guarantee of collective security was real, but we needed to make it tangible by stationing more troops in more eastern countries. Britain would play its part by pledging to station 3,500 UK troops in eastern Europe. And we would make sure the so-called rapid reaction force was genuinely rapid – deployable within two to five days – with headquarters provided by the UK.

  On modernising defence, we agreed that a fifth of national defence budgets would be spent on new equipment, and that, crucially, our armed forces could operate together by meeting NATO common standards.

  Although the eastern Europeans were at the stronger end of the spectrum arguing for a more robust response on Ukraine, while the French, Germans and southern Europeans were not quite so strident, by and large there was unanimity, and NATO’s purpose was restated. ‘No one should doubt NATO’s resolve if the security of any of its members were to be threatened,’ the communiqué said. We even got every NATO nation to sign an Armed Forces Declaration, which was effectively the Military Covenant we had created in the UK.

  And finally there was a joint declaration to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence. Rather like the commitment of 0.7 per cent to overseas development, this was a target set out by a multilateral body (NATO), agreed by many countries (in 2006), but only met by a few (the US, the UK, Estonia and Greece). As I’ve said, the UK became the only major economy to meet both commitments. So much for a small island.

  While I had led Europe’s response to Russia in the initial phases of the invasion, the peace initiatives were largely handled by France and Germany. Along with Russia and Ukraine, they formed the ‘Normandy Format’ established during the commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings.

  The reason was simple. Putin had arrived at the event suggesting a large-scale meeting, but Obama and I both thought it inappropriate to overshadow an important ceremony. Also, it seemed wrong to discuss the prospect of legitimising even a small part of what Russia had done just as we were remembering the sacrifices so many had made the last time many of Europe’s borders had been redrawn by force. I was quite happy for the UK and the US to watch from a distance, keeping up the pressure on Russia as Germany (with France largely as a makeweight) explored potential deals.

  Yes, it looked as if we’d been sidelined, but I didn’t care how it looked. I believe I had seen Putin’s game for what it was, and responded robustly, earlier than other Western leaders. But what mattered was progress, and ultimately peace. And I respected both Germany’s expertise in the region and Merkel’s doggedness with Putin.

  After the failed ceasefire of the Minsk Protocol in 2014, the subsequent plan to bring peace to the region, Minsk II, was signed on 12 February 2015. But as things stan
d today the conflict is continuing, if relatively ‘frozen’ in terms of casualties. Ukraine still has no control of its eastern borders. The rebel areas remain under Moscow’s de facto control. And there is no sign of the West, the EU in particular, being prepared to use its economic power to the extent required to make the Russian occupation of the Donetsk region unaffordable.

  How should we judge this episode? You could say that Putin won. He has Crimea. He has destabilised a significant neighbour, and effectively controls the eastern portion of the country. But compared with what happened in Georgia, the international coalition was stronger and more successful. Putin’s ambitions have in fact been thwarted. He launched this attack because he didn’t want a Western-oriented Ukraine, and that is what he now has. Strategically he has lost, not gained, ground.

  In other words, the bear has bitten a chunk out of Ukraine, but Ukraine retains its vast economic potential. The West needs to back that; Ukraine needs help in eliminating the corruption, the over-powerful oligarchs and the extreme poverty. In 1990, Poland and Ukraine had the same GDP. But since Poland pursued its European path, its GDP has increased fivefold. Ukraine could do the same.

  Something else happened at the NATO conference – a crisis that seemingly came from nowhere.

  I had only vaguely heard of Ebola, a virus which first appeared in southern Sudan and Zaire in the 1970s. Incredibly contagious, passed on by contact with bodily fluid, it leads to a slow, painful and bloody death. It had remained largely dormant since. But in January 2014 the disease forced itself onto the global agenda after a suspected outbreak in Guinea.

  Governments make contingencies for global catastrophes, and when you lead a government you have an insight into this worst-case world of nuclear war, mass terror attacks, cyber warfare, natural disasters and pandemics. Was Ebola the catastrophe we had been dreading? If so, the world wasn’t ready. The World Health Organization, one of the most dysfunctional examples of an international institution, did not call a public health emergency until August 2014, five months after the disease had spread from Guinea to neighbouring Liberia. West African countries, unlike those in equatorial Africa, were completely unprepared for such an outbreak.