Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  The Russians were dismissive of the unconvincing presentation given by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Security Council on 5 February 2003, purporting to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ‘We were shown photos taken from space,’ Sergei Ivanov recalls, ‘huge trucks, juggernauts, carrying chemical weapons. They said that it was reliable evidence. We said, “Well, maybe you have this intelligence, but we don’t.” ’12

  Putin was not, however, initially inclined to spoil his budding relationship with George W. Bush by making a public stand. At first he stuck in his public pronouncements to a position of guarded support for American efforts to ensure Saddam’s disarmament. He told French journalists: ‘The only task facing the international community there is to satisfy itself that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction or to find them and force Iraq to destroy those weapons. In this connection we share the position of our American partners which is that we must do everything in order that Iraq would engage in a full-fledged cooperation with the UN inspectors.’

  When he travelled to Berlin on 9 February for a short meeting with Chancellor Schröder, Putin warned that the ‘unilateral use of force against Iraq would only bring suffering to millions of people and further escalate tensions in the region’. But he also cautioned against stoking up anti-American sentiments.

  His line became much tougher when he moved on the next day to Paris for a state visit, during which the three leaders issued a joint declaration condemning the use of force. The tripartite declaration was a French–German initiative. Schröder and Chirac had forged a very close relationship, which had culminated just the previous month in celebrations at Versailles to mark the 40th anniversary of the historic Elysée treaty of friendship between the two countries. According to Chirac’s adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne (known in diplomatic circles as ‘MGM’), ‘we were close allies of the Germans and knew they shared the same assessment of the Iraq situation, but we didn’t know about the other permanent members of the Security Council. The British were with the Americans, but what would the Russians and Chinese do? So it was utterly important for us to know what the Russians would do.’ He says that until they met, neither Putin nor Chirac felt absolutely sure that the other would be prepared to veto a second resolution, and neither wanted to end up doing it alone. Germany, as a non-permanent member of the Security Council, had a vote but no power of veto, so Schröder was relying on Chirac to cast the veto on his behalf – and to get Putin on board too.13

  MGM and his German counterpart drafted a joint statement and agreed that Chirac would try to get Putin to sign up when he arrived in Paris from Berlin. The French laid on a lavish reception for him at Charles de Gaulle airport – military band, red carpet, guard of honour provided by the three services and the National Guard. Chirac even went to the steps of the plane to greet Putin and presented him with an imposing bouquet of flowers. MGM says it was all designed to flatter the Russian: ‘He wanted to show respect to Putin, to please him, and for the Russians to feel that they are a great country, and that they are a full partner in the international community.’ Flying into the city on an air force helicopter, Chirac showed Putin the text of the declaration, and he said yes right away, asking only for a few small changes. MGM and Putin’s diplomatic adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, went off to make the changes and agree them with Berlin. The declaration said: ‘There is still an alternative to war. The use of force can only be considered as a last resort. Russia, Germany and France are determined to ensure that everything possible is done to disarm Iraq peacefully.’

  But in essence, says Gourdault-Montagne, it was a ‘pact’: ‘Putin, until that moment, had some doubts about France, because at that time there was a lot of talk to the effect that the French are showing their muscles, but at the last moment they will change their minds and go with the US. Now Putin knew that Chirac would impose a veto, and we knew the Russians would be with us. We knew that we were together.’

  And Washington knew that if it went to war against Iraq it would have to be without the authorisation of the United Nations. Condoleezza Rice admits: ‘We didn’t much like this spectacle of America’s closest allies standing with the Russians on a security interest of the United States.’14

  In the month before the war started, Putin undertook two rounds of secret diplomacy to try to avert it. On 22 February he sent one of Russia’s most experienced politicians, Yevgeny Primakov, to Baghdad. Primakov for some reason often attracts the epithet ‘wily’, and perhaps he is: he had opposed Putin’s rise in 1999 but later supported him; before that he had served as head of the foreign intelligence service, foreign minister and prime minister; most importantly, a Middle East expert, he had known Saddam Hussein for years, so he was ideal for this mission. At the time, when news of his trip leaked out, there was speculation that he might have been trying to persuade Saddam to destroy his Al Samoud 2 missiles. The foreign ministry, forced to say something, said his purpose was to ‘explain Russia’s position on Iraq and receive an assurance it would fulfil UN resolutions and cooperate “completely and unconditionally” with weapons inspectors’.

  In fact, his mission was much more dramatic than that. Putin had charged him with only one task: to persuade Saddam to stand down and thereby save his country from invasion. Saddam listened to Primakov, took notes, asked him to repeat the message in front of his deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, then stood up, pressed his hand on Primakov’s shoulder and left.

  Primakov flew back to Moscow and reported the bad news – first to Putin, then to a full meeting of the Security Council in the Kremlin. They had one last trick up their sleeves. It was agreed that Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, should fly immediately to Washington to try one last time to talk the Americans out of their plan for war.

  He arrived late at night and went to a restaurant with the Russian ambassador, Yuri Ushakov. They drank into the small hours, and then Voloshin suddenly got a call to meet the CIA director, George Tenet, at 8.15. ‘I’d only just got to bed,’ he recalled later, with a smile. From the CIA he was taken to the White House to meet Condoleezza Rice, and during their conversation President Bush ‘dropped by’ (the only way diplomatic protocol allowed the president to meet someone of Voloshin’s rank). ‘He made a ten-minute speech about the threat of international terrorism,’ says Voloshin. ‘He was very passionate, standing up rather than sitting. Then pleasantries. Twenty minutes in all. I told him we didn’t agree, but I felt he was not interested in my answers. He had made up his mind already so he wasn’t much worried about the arguments – only in whether we would support him.’ An American official confirms that ‘the president wasn’t there to listen to what Voloshin had to say and reply’.

  Voloshin was granted access to every top official – Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, the Senate leader. But it was his meeting with commerce secretary Donald Evans that astonished him most. Evans asked if they could speak privately, and they went to his office. Evans said: ‘You are close to Putin, I am close to President Bush, and he has asked me to put it to you – what do you want in exchange for supporting us?’

  Voloshin understood that they were offering a bribe: Russia stood to lose billions of dollars’ worth of contracts in Iraq, and Washington was offering to compensate. ‘We don’t want to bargain,’ Voloshin said. ‘This is a bad war which will harm everyone. And Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism.’

  In a final, rather pathetic, move the Americans tried to prove to Voloshin that there was a connection between Saddam and Chechnya. An American official recalled in an interview: ‘We thought this would be an issue that would catch the Russians’ attention, but Voloshin came out at the end saying, “That was totally uninteresting, there is nothing new in this presentation.” ’

  Voloshin confirms: ‘They told me a long, touching story about a terrorist who fought in Chechnya and later turned up in Iraq. It was pretty primitive, but they tried it on.’

  Even scratching Putin’s rawes
t itch achieved nothing. The two sides were poles apart. Operation Shock and Awe began on 19 March.

  Putin snubbed

  For Putin, Iraq was not the be all and end all. There were still important prizes to aim for: the cancellation of America’s missile defence plans, WTO membership, increased trade, and so on. He decided not to let his failure stand in the way of his friendship with Bush.

  Another opportunity was coming to impress the world with his openness and ‘Europeanness’. At the end of May, his home town of St Petersburg – built by Peter the Great as Russia’s ‘Window on the West’ – would celebrate its 300th anniversary. No wall was left unpainted, no stucco ornament ungilded, as the city was refurbished for a long weekend of partying, to which every major leader was invited. Putin planned to bask in the glory of St Petersburg’s Italianate avenues and palaces.

  On the Friday he opened a Baltic youth festival, hosted a summit of Asian leaders on board a river ship, and took the leaders of Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Austria on personal guided tours of the city. In the evening the Mariinsky Theatre had never seen so many world leaders at one time. Next day he had talks with more presidents, and a summit with the entire European Union leadership. The world’s elite toured the Hermitage art gallery, and attended a water festival on the Neva river.

  And then, finally, on the second evening, George W. Bush turned up for the last supper. He had decided to visit Poland first – New Europe, a country that had contributed to the Iraq war. Putin was insulted.

  Maurice Gourdault-Montagne caught the Russian mood. ‘I think it was a tremendous disappointment for the Russians. It was surprising that Condi [Rice], with whom I have a good relationship and who is supposed to know what is in the Russian brain, gave Bush this terrible advice to go to Warsaw prior to St Petersburg. I just couldn’t understand it.’

  MGM then heard Putin and Chirac in conversation, and registered that the love affair with America was over. Putin was saying to Chirac: ‘My priorities were the following: first a relationship with America, second with China, third with Europe. Now it is the other way around – first Europe, then China, then America.’

  May 2002 had witnessed the triumphant signing of the Moscow treaty on nuclear arms reduction and the creation in Rome of the NATO–Russia Council. One year later, the mood had changed. And things were about to get even worse.

  6

  PUTIN MARK II

  Georgia looks West

  On the evening of Saturday 22 November 2003 Russia’s leaders retired after their regular Security Council meeting to Genatsvale, one of the best Georgian restaurants in central Moscow. The solid oak table was laden with appetisers – hot khachapuri cheese bread, pots of red and green lobio beans, aubergine and walnut rolls, chicken tsatsivi ... Smoke from the logs burning in the hearth curled under the wooden rafters, and vines were growing on the timber walls. Waiters hovered with Russian vodka and Georgian wine, serving Russia’s power elite: President Putin, Prime Minister Kasyanov, chief of staff Medvedev, security council secretary Rushailo, foreign minister Igor Ivanov, defence minister Sergei Ivanov, and FSB chief Patrushev.

  The choice of venue had been influenced by the leadership’s discussions earlier in the day about events unfolding in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. For three weeks President Eduard Shevardnadze – the former Soviet foreign minister – had been facing down growing protests in the streets following parliamentary elections that everyone believed were fraudulent. Shevardnadze himself was due to rule as president for a further two years, but there was widespread dissatisfaction at the corruption and misrule of his government. Opposition leaders were demanding his resignation. Putin was no big fan of Shevardnadze, holding him partly responsible for the collapse of the USSR, but he did not like the idea of unruly crowds trying to seize power in a country on Russia’s border. He was aware, too, that the student protests, under the slogan ‘Kmara’ (Enough) were modelled on the movement that had brought down Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000, and were supported by American democracy groups, including the Open Society Institute of the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and the National Democratic Institute, an organisation dedicated to the strengthening of democracy around the world (the kind of democracy Putin feared).

  Suddenly an aide asked Putin to take a call on a secure telephone. It was Shevardnadze. Earlier that Saturday events had finally spun out of his control. He had gone to the parliament, determined to convene it and thereby legitimise the election results, but the main opposition leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, told a huge rally in the main square: ‘We have only one aim – to rid the country of this man (Shevardnadze).’ Mayhem broke out as the opposition leaders swept into the debating chamber, each carrying a rose, and Shevardnadze was hustled out to safety by his bodyguards. The speaker of parliament, Nino Burjanadze, declared that she was assuming presidential powers. It was the start of what became known as the Rose Revolution – the first of the so-called ‘coloured revolutions’ that brought democracy to countries on Russia’s borders, revolutions that Putin came to regard as a threat to Russia itself. Shevardnadze retreated to his residence and declared a state of emergency. And then he called Putin.

  Back in the 1970s, when he was Georgia’s Communist Party leader, Shevardnadze had notoriously affirmed his republic’s subservient position to Russia in the USSR by saying: ‘For us in Georgia the sun rises in the north.’ Now, as he desperately tried to cling to power in the independent state of Georgia, he effectively confirmed that little had changed, by turning to Putin for help. To the group seated around the table in Genatsvale it was obvious which of them should be dispatched to Tbilisi. Igor Ivanov, the foreign minister, had a Georgian mother and even knew a smattering of the language. He also knew Shevardnadze from the 1980s, when he had worked as his adviser in the foreign ministry. Putin sent him straight to the airport, with a posse of security guards and clear instructions to do whatever he could to avoid bloodshed in the streets of Tbilisi and ensure things were done in accordance with the Georgian constitution (which effectively meant: don’t let a mob overthrow the president).

  ‘You know,’ Ivanov said in an interview, ‘we didn’t always have very easy relations with Shevardnadze, but Putin was nonetheless quite clear – he was the legal, legitimately elected president, and we must help him.’1

  Ivanov flew into Tbilisi after midnight and had a meeting scheduled with Shevardnadze in the morning. But before then he wanted to test the mood, so he took two bodyguards and set off to where the protesters were camped out in the city centre. He picked his way among the tents and campfires trying to gauge how explosive the atmosphere was. ‘I don’t really understand Georgian,’ he told us, ‘but you could get a sense of the place.’

  Suddenly somebody recognised him, and a buzz spread through the square: ‘Ivanov is here, Ivanov is here!’ The word quickly reached the ears of Zurab Zhvania, a popular politician and former speaker of parliament, who, together with Saakashvili and Burjanadze, was one of the leaders of the Rose Revolution. By now the crowd was becoming restless, and Zhvania urged Ivanov to get up on to the podium and address them. Ivanov recalled: ‘I asked him how to say in Georgian, “Long live friendship between Russia and Georgia.” I repeated that a few times into the microphone, and it seemed to go down well! I got the feeling that the people felt Russia could help somehow in resolving this conflict.’

  Nino Burjanadze, the speaker of parliament and since the previous afternoon self-proclaimed acting president, was in her office. ‘Zhvania and Saakashvili and I had been working till about four in the morning,’ she recalled later, ‘and now I was dozing in my armchair, when my secretary came in and said: “Ivanov is addressing the crowd.” I thought I was dreaming! But I went downstairs, and sure enough there he was, even saying something to them in Georgian!’2

  Ivanov now ended up in the role of mediator, shuttling between the opposition and President Shevardnadze. In the small hours of the morning he held talks with Saakashvili, Zhvania
and Burjanadze to find out exactly what their demands were. Retelling these events, Ivanov insisted that at no stage did anyone insist on Shevardnadze’s resignation; rather it was a question of re-running the parliamentary election that the opposition knew had been stolen from them. Ivanov spent the rest of the night consulting Georgian friends and diplomats, and came to the conclusion that ‘the pendulum was swinging in the direction of the opposition’.

  That was the message he took to President Shevardnadze in the morning. ‘I had known him since 1985, and felt I could say to him quite openly that I had met all these people, in the opposition and in his own entourage, and sensed that he had lost almost all support.’ Ivanov felt that he failed to convince Shevardnadze that he was so isolated, but he did persuade him to meet the opposition leaders.

  Ivanov finally brought Zhvania and Saakashvili to Shevardnadze’s residence for talks in the afternoon of the 23rd. At this point he felt he had done all that was required of him. ‘I sat down at the table. Shevardnadze and his assistant were on one side; Zhvania and Saakashvili were on the other. I said: “I think I have done what I came to do. President Putin asked me to help you find a political solution. That’s up to you now – to hold talks and avoid bloodshed. So I will leave you now.” ’

  Thereupon Ivanov left the residence and flew to the city of Batumi in western Georgia, where he was due to meet the local leader, Aslan Abashidze. The outcome he expected from the talks he had arranged in Tbilisi was an agreement to re-run the elections, with Shevardnadze staying on as president, at least for the moment. But when he got off the plane in Batumi, Abashidze greeted him with the words: ‘What on earth have you done? Shevardnadze has resigned!’