Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  ‘The message of Georgia to our great neighbour Russia,’ Saakashvili proclaimed, ‘is: enough is enough.’

  The Russians took it as a deliberate humiliation and retaliated with the harshest of sanctions: they recalled their ambassador, and cut all rail, sea, road, air and postal links. Georgians living in Moscow began to feel the heat: hundreds who could not produce legitimate papers were rounded up and put on planes bound for Tbilisi; schools were asked to provide lists of children with Georgian-sounding names so that the authorities could investigate whether they were illegal immigrants.

  Murder of Anna Politkovskaya

  Western governments were only getting into their stride with criticism of Russia’s démarche against Georgia when something much more shocking happened. On 7 October 2006, Putin’s 54th birthday, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya – known around the world for her bold reporting from Chechnya and criticism of the Kremlin – was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow. The murder stunned people around the world – but not, apparently, Vladimir Putin. At first he gave no reaction at all. Then, four days later during a trip to Germany, he finally responded to a reporter’s question by dismissing her as essentially unimportant.

  It was, he said, ‘a disgustingly cruel crime’ and her killers should not go unpunished. But he added: ‘Her impact on Russian political life was only very slight. She was well known in the media community, in human rights circles and in the West, but her influence on political life within Russia was very minimal. The murder of someone like her, the brutal murder of a woman and mother, was in itself an act directed against our country and against the Russian authorities. This murder deals a far greater blow to the authorities in Russia, and in Chechnya, to which she devoted much of her recent professional work, than did any of her publications.’ It was one of Putin’s more grotesque utterances: Politkovskaya’s death, he was saying, was actually aimed against him, and would have a greater effect than her insignificant writings had. He lamented the murder of ‘a woman and mother’, not of the journalist.

  I once asked his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, whether Putin had read much of Politkovskaya’s work. ‘No,’ he replied, shaking his head as if to underline that she wasn’t worth reading. But it is hard to believe that Putin did not know of her work. She worked for the most prominent opposition newspaper, Novaya gazeta, co-owned by ex-President Mikhail Gorbachev. Her articles contained stinging criticism of human rights abuses in Russia and particularly of Putin’s war in Chechnya. She had negotiated with the hostage-takers in the Dubrovka theatre crisis, and might have done the same during the Beslan school siege had she not been poisoned on the plane as she flew down from Moscow (another unexplained crime). Leaders of other countries condemned her murder and demanded a thorough investigation. The State Department described her as ‘personally courageous and committed to seeking justice even in the face of previous death threats’.

  Yet the Kremlin was unmoved.

  Suspicions automatically fell on the leadership of Chechnya, and specifically its prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, whom Politkovskaya had fiercely criticised for human rights abuses. Some speculated that people loyal to him might have killed her for revenge, others that his enemies killed her to cast suspicion on him.

  Kadyrov became prime minister of Chechnya, and later president, following the assassination of his father, Akhmat Kadyrov, whom Putin had installed as a pro-Russian president by means of a rigged election in 2003. Both had previously been on the rebel side – the elder Kadyrov was the mufti, or religious leader, of Chechnya under its separatist leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and had even called for a jihad against Russia. I once had tea with him in a house in rebel-held Chechnya in 1995. I recall that he asked rather disarmingly whether the British people were generally converting to Islam. The Kadyrovs later reversed their anti-Russian stance, however, and supported the war launched by Putin against the insurgents in 1999. Ramzan’s militia, known as kadyrovtsi or Kadyrovites, acquired an unsavoury reputation – accused of torture, abductions and murders. Moscow installed first Akhmat, then Ramzan, as ‘quisling’ leaders – Chechens loyal to Moscow – under a new strategy to pacify the republic.

  In the wake of the Chechen terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, the Kremlin deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, gave this explanation of Russia’s strategy towards Chechnya: ‘The solution is complex and hard. And we have begun to put it into practice. It entails the active socialisation of the northern Caucasus, the gradual creation of democratic institutions and the foundations of civil society, of an effective system of law and order, and of industrial capacity and social infrastructure, the overcoming of mass unemployment, corruption and the collapse of culture and education.’ In reality, Kremlin policy amounted to the surrender of the republic to the loyal Ramzan Kadyrov, allowing him to enrich himself and run the place as he pleased so long as it was kept inside the Russian Federation. Kadyrov professes ‘love’ for Putin and calls him his ‘idol’. He renamed the main street in Grozny, the capital, Putin Avenue.

  The strategy has been partially successful. Despite the continuation of terrorist atrocities, mainly outside of Chechnya, by the remaining Islamic rebels, Kadyrov has restored a semblance of order within the republic. Grozny, totally destroyed in the two wars, has been largely rebuilt, using petrodollars thrown at it from Moscow. It boasts Europe’s largest mosque. It has normal shops and cafés again – something I thought I would never see when I reported from the bombed-out city in the late 1990s. But the strategy is a double-edged sword for Putin. The muscular, bearded Kadyrov is a wayward and ruthless individual. I visited his palace outside the village of Tsentoroy in 2008 and got a taste of his fabulous wealth – the grounds include an artificial lake and a zoo with panthers and leopards – and his primitive way of thinking. Asked what he thought about the death of the rebel leader Shamil Basayev, the mastermind behind most of the recent terrorist attacks in Russia, Kadyrov replied: ‘I was delighted when I heard he was killed ... and then sad, because I wanted to kill him with my own hands.’ He has introduced elements of Sharia law in his fiefdom, and congratulated men who sprayed paintballs at women who appeared in public with their heads uncovered.

  American diplomats attending a riotous wedding reception in Dagestan in August 2006 witnessed Kadyrov, the guest of honour, dancing with a gold-plated pistol stuck down the back of his jeans and showering dancing children with hundred-dollar bills.5

  True to Chechen tradition, Kadyrov is quick to promise retribution and blood vengeance on his enemies. On his watch many opponents have disappeared. His former bodyguard, Umar Israilov, who went public about torture and killings by the Kadyrovites that he had witnessed, was shot dead in Vienna in January 2009. Six months later Natalya Estemirova, who worked for the Memorial human rights centre in Grozny, was abducted and murdered. Kadyrov described her as a woman ‘without honour, dignity or conscience’. As for Anna Politkovskaya, in 2004 she published an account of a terrifying meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov, during which he boasted that his hobbies were fighting and women. The interview included the following comical exchange:

  ‘What kind of education do you have?’

  ‘Higher. Law. I’m graduating soon, sitting my exams.’

  ‘What kind of exams?’

  ‘What do you mean, what kind? Exams, that’s all.’

  ‘What’s the name of the college you are graduating from?’

  ‘A branch of the Moscow Business Institute, in Gudermes. The law faculty.’

  ‘What are you specialising in?

  ‘I’m a lawyer.’

  ‘But is your diploma in criminal law, civil law ...?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I wrote something, but I’ve forgotten. There’s a lot of events going on.’

  Kadyrov was later made an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

  Politkovskaya was taken back to see him again the next morning, and found him with a Kadyrovite in a black T-shirt who snarled at her: ‘You sho
uld have been shot back in Moscow, in the street, the way they do it in Moscow.’ And Kadyrov chimed in: ‘You’re an enemy. You should be shot.’

  Politkovskaya described him as a ‘baby dragon, raised by the Kremlin. Now they need to feed him. Otherwise he will set everything on fire.’ She was about to publish another article about human rights abuses and torture in Chechnya when she was killed.

  Her murder took place not only on Putin’s birthday but two days after Kadyrov’s. (I know this because I happened to be sitting next to Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in a Moscow restaurant that evening, when he took out his mobile phone and called ‘Ramzan’ to congratulate him fulsomely on turning 30.) Could the murder have been someone’s slightly belated ‘birthday present’ to the Chechen strongman? Or could it have been Kadyrov’s gift to his ‘idol’, Putin? In Russia’s criminal underworld, such an idea is not implausible. Or was the murder designed to discredit one or other of them? Or was there some other motive? One thing was clear: the Kremlin was intensely annoyed by Politkovskaya’s work – particularly some of her more extravagant claims, such as her assertion that the 2002 Moscow theatre siege, which ended with 130 deaths, was stage-managed by one of Russia’s secret services.

  Prosecutors brought three Chechens to trial, but they were acquitted in 2009 for lack of evidence. A retrial was later ordered, and a fourth man, accused of being the actual assassin, was arrested. In August 2011 a former police officer, Lt. Col. Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, who had appeared as a witness in the earlier trial, was charged with plotting the murder. As for who might have commissioned the crime – the courts have not even come close to establishing that.

  It’s our oil

  Russia faced more criticism during 2006 as Putin and the siloviki moved to assert greater control over the country’s energy resources, some of which belonged to foreign companies. We saw earlier that the prospect of Yukos selling out to an American oil major was one of the factors that prompted the arrest of Khodorkovsky and the nationalisation of his assets. Now Putin turned his attention to so-called Production Sharing Agreements which Boris Yeltsin had signed with Western oil companies. Under a PSA, the foreign company finances all the development and exploration, and when the oil or gas comes on stream it is allowed to keep the first revenues to recoup its costs; after that the profits are shared (in agreed proportions) by the government and the company.

  Putin believed these were humiliating agreements, the kind of deal a Third World country enters into because it doesn’t have the skills or knowhow to extract the oil itself. The first PSA, signed in 1994, was known as Sakhalin-2: a consortium called Sakhalin Energy, comprising Royal Dutch Shell (55 per cent) and two Japanese companies, Mitsui and Mitsubishi, was developing huge oil and gas fields near the island of Sakhalin in Russia’s far east. The development costs foreseen in the agreement came to $10 billion, so this was the sum that Shell and its partners would be able to recover from the first sales before any revenues would begin to flow to the Russian state.

  In 2005, however, Shell revealed that the development costs had doubled, to $20 billion. On a visit to the Netherlands in November, Putin ‘gave a roasting’ to Shell’s CEO, Jeroen van der Veer. It meant Russia was going to lose $10 billion. It gave Putin the excuse he needed to overturn the 12-year-old deal, which he did by means of plotting and pressuring over the course of 2006. Instrumental to the government’s strategy was Oleg Mitvol, a fierce environmental activist who was deputy head of the government’s Service for Supervision of Natural Resources, Rosprirodnadzor. In May 2006 the service’s representatives from the far east region came to see Mitvol in Moscow and showed him some photographs. ‘It was unbelievable,’ he recalls. ‘There were photos of forests that had been turfed upside down, landslips, total chaos, on a huge scale. I said to them, “What is this?” and they said, it’s Sakhalin Energy building pipelines.’6 The construction work included almost a thousand pipes laid across spawning rivers, preventing fish from swimming upstream.

  Mitvol made it a personal crusade. He took journalists to Sakhalin to show them the damage. Rosprirodnadzor estimated it would cost $50 billion just to clean up Aniva Bay, where large-scale dredging had ruined fishing grounds (something denied by Shell).

  It was assumed by most observers at the time that Mitvol was simply doing the government’s bidding, digging up dirt to bolster its case against Shell. The press called him the Kremlin’s ‘attack dog’. But he insists that he was motivated entirely by environmental concerns and worked more closely with Greenpeace and other environmental groups than with the Kremlin. He even says he had a call at one point from a ‘very high official’ who was concerned he was being too strident in his criticisms, and ‘spoiling the investment climate’. Other environmentalists I have spoken to say they believe this: they too were appalled by the damage done to the forests and marine life, and they knew Mitvol to be a real eco-warrior, who, among other achievements, also helped to persuade Putin to ban seal-hunting.

  That said, Mitvol could never have waged such a campaign against a major foreign investor without top-level backing, and Shell’s position became impossible. In December Sakhalin Energy buckled to the pressure and sold 51 per cent of the project to Gazprom. Putin had succeeded in renationalising the world’s biggest combined oil and natural gas project. At the signing ceremony, the president declared that the environmental problems could now be considered ‘resolved’. The Sakhalin crisis was over, but the Kremlin’s strong-arm tactics caused long-term damage to Russia’s efforts to woo foreign investors.

  For Putin, this was just part of a strategy, aimed at ensuring that Russia’s strategic energy resources remained, or were retaken, under state control. Foreign companies were welcome to participate in joint projects, but Russia would never again give away its resources as Yeltsin had so recklessly done. New legislation was drafted to limit non-Russian involvement in 42 industries, including arms and aircraft, fisheries, precious metals and hydrocarbons.

  Putin was less squeamish about other countries’ strategic assets. As oil prices rose and the Kremlin’s coffers filled up with petro-dollars, Russia started looking to invest abroad. Gazprom showed an interest in buying Centrica, Britain’s major gas supplier. Then it began talks on acquiring a 50 per cent stake in the Central European Gas Hub at Baumgarten in Austria – the main distribution centre for EU gas supplies. The European Commission blocked the move.

  In September 2006 it become known that the state-controlled bank VTB had quietly bought a 5 per cent stake in EADS, the world’s biggest aerospace company, producer of Airbus and a great deal of defence equipment. Putin’s diplomatic adviser Sergei Prikhodko then suggested they would like more – perhaps 25 per cent, enough to block major decisions. When Angela Merkel heard about it she told President Chirac of France in no uncertain terms that this could not be allowed to happen. Chirac and Merkel met Putin at Compiègne, outside Paris, towards the end of September and told him this was one investment that was not welcome.

  On a visit to Bavaria the following month, Putin mocked the West for its nervousness: ‘Why the hysteria? It’s not the Red Army coming, but Russian businesses with money to invest.’

  A Cold War encounter

  It was Saturday 21 October 2006. The last, yellowing leaves were falling from the birch trees outside Putin’s window at his country residence, Novo-Ogaryovo. It was cold and raining. He was already in a foul mood. The previous day he had attended a summit with 25 European Union leaders in Lahti, Finland. It was supposed to be an ‘informal’ meeting, a cosy gathering with no set agenda or agreements to be signed, but nonetheless he had had to listen to a litany of complaints – about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, about his government’s attempts to squeeze Shell out of the multi-billion-dollar Sakhalin-2 project, about Russia’s unreliability as an energy provider, and about Georgia.

  The Europeans explained that they were keen to build a close partnership with Russia’s southern neighbour and deplored the sanctions recently introduced b
y the Kremlin. But Putin expounded at some length his view that President Saakashvili was hell-bent on regaining the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and warned them that this would lead to bloodshed. Only his friend Jacques Chirac supported him, telling the others that relations with Russia were more important than Georgia.

  It was the middle of the night before Putin got home. On Saturday afternoon he called his 11 most powerful colleagues – his Security Council – to his residence. He told them about his uncomfortable meeting with the EU leaders, and they considered their options in Georgia. Putin also had an appointment with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who was waiting at her hotel in Moscow, but he was not looking forward to it. ‘He didn’t feel like meeting her,’ one of his close aides recalls, ‘but he knew he had to.’

  Rice was wondering why their meeting was so delayed. ‘Usually he saw me right away, unless he wanted to make a point,’ she said later.7

  After their working session the members of the Security Council drove to a nearby government lodge – a baronial-style chateau at Barvikha – for a special dinner. Three members, including the security council secretary, Igor Ivanov, and the future president, Dmitry Medvedev, had recent birthdays to celebrate.

  Here, Putin decided to play a ‘joke’ on Rice. According to one of those present, he looked at his watch, and a mischievous smile appeared on his face. ‘Why do we have to wind things up in a rush? Let’s put on a little show for her. If she wants, tell her I will meet her here, but don’t tell her I’ve got the entire Security Council with me.’