Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  Sarkozy flew to Tbilisi with the paper. But it was to point 6 that Saakashvili refused to sign up, because ‘talks on future status’ seemed to leave the question of Georgia’s territorial integrity open. Lavrov said in an interview that the whole point of having the clause about international talks on the regions’ status was to demonstrate that Russia did not intend to recognise them unilaterally: it would be up to an international conference to decide. But Saakashvili was adamant, and the point was changed, after a quick midnight phone-call from Sarkozy to Medvedev in Moscow, to read: ‘talks on security and stability’ in the two regions. Those talks have continued off and on, achieving little, in Geneva ever since.

  But Saakashvili had already lost the big point. On 26 August, President Medvedev suddenly announced that Russia was recognising the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Two new states were born, which would be recognised by only Venezuela, Nicaragua and the Pacific island of Nauru. Even Russia’s former Soviet allies would not go down that road. Russia had finally accepted the Kosovo precedent (though not, of course, in relation to Kosovo itself). For all the world it gave the impression that annexation would be the next move, and that this had been Russia’s intent from the outset.

  I have yet to meet a Russian who looked very happy about the situation. It can be pointed out that Georgia’s NATO aspirations have been knocked for six, or that Russia has allegedly ‘increased its security’, and is now building a new naval base in Abkhazia. But without doubt Russia’s security interests would have been better served by having a peaceful relationship with Georgia.

  In the end, the tragedy of Georgia and its war with Russia may come down to the personal tragedy of one mercurial and deluded man. Nino Burjanadze, formerly a close ally of Saakashvili, says he ‘rushed into war totally convinced he would defeat the Russian army. The last time I spoke to him was five days before the war began, and I said to him: “If you start this war it will mean the end for my country, and I will never forgive you.” ’ But another question is why Saakashvili’s supporters in the West, especially in the United States, while cautioning him against starting a war, at the same time encouraged his belief that he could get away with it. Angela Merkel and others knew about his impetuousness, yet NATO recklessly insisted on promising his country (and Ukraine) membership – even though that made Russia feel insecure. To this day, no serious attempt has been made to visualise a future in which all the countries of Europe and North America might act together to ensure their security, rather than imagining that the security of some can be built at the expense of the security of others.

  The events described in this chapter illustrate better than any in the past 12 years the failure of Russia and the West to understand one another and to take one another’s concerns and fears into account. Bush preached and lectured. Putin raged and menaced. America said that Russia must give up its ‘sphere of influence’ in its ‘near abroad’. Russia said that America should stop acting as if it ruled the world. Bush accused Putin of communist-style authoritarianism. Putin accused Bush of Cold War thinking. Both were right. The result was inevitable.

  11

  RESETTING RELATIONS WITH THE WEST

  Repercussions of the Caucasus war

  The Russians were livid with the West for siding with Georgia over a war that it had started. They lashed out at everyone in sight, demonstrating a fragile grip on reality. The Georgian attack on Tskhinvali was compared to the 9/11 attack on the United States. In the true tradition of Russian conspiracy theory, Vladimir Putin declared that the Americans had instigated the whole conflict in order to shore up the position of Senator John McCain, Barack Obama’s Republican rival in the American presidential election.

  The foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that certain foreign powers decided to use Saakashvili ‘to test the strength of Russian authority’ and ‘to force us to embark on the path of militarisation and abandon modernisation’. The minister insisted the Russians had done nothing more than take out positions from which the Georgians could attack them. Speaking to the British foreign secretary David Miliband on his cellphone, Lavrov referred to Mikheil Saakashvili as a ‘fucking lunatic’.

  The Russians appeared to be oblivious to the fact that they were in the international doghouse having invaded and occupied a large part of a neighbouring country. At the end of August, President Medvedev made his first – of several – attempts to draw weighty conclusions from the war. He enunciated five new ‘principles’ of Russian foreign policy, some of which had alarming implications. Principle number four declared that defending the lives and dignity of Russians, wherever they might be, was the priority. This included ‘protecting the interests of our business community abroad’. Anyone who committed an aggressive act against them would be rebuffed, Medvedev promised. Point five declared that there were regions where Russia had ‘privileged interests’. This appeared to include all the neighbouring post-Soviet countries, where ethnic Russians lived. Medvedev pointedly did not use the expression ‘sphere of influence’ – but that is essentially what he meant. It implied that former Soviet republics such as Estonia and Latvia, now members of the EU and NATO but with large Russian minorities, were officially considered part of Moscow’s domain. The new policy was, perhaps, the precise opposite of what one might have expected a chastened Russia to adopt following the Georgia crisis.

  Showing no sign of humility, the Russians saw the war as a pretext to plough on with their old, already rejected initiatives. In October President Medvedev rushed to a conference in Evian, France, and reiterated his call for a new European security treaty, saying events in the Caucasus had ‘demonstrated how absolutely right’ his idea was, and were ‘proof that the international security system based on unipolarity no longer works’. What was he saying? Had he forgotten that it was his country that had just violated the security and territorial integrity of a neighbour? His long-winded appeal for a new treaty fell mostly on deaf ears. This really was, as Saakashvili might have put it, the fox demanding co-ownership of the chicken-house.

  As for Vladimir Putin, his new post as prime minister meant that the economy, rather than foreign policy, was now his major responsibility. That, too, gave him the levers to meddle in a region of ‘privileged interest’. The main lever was Gazprom, the huge state monopoly he had refused to allow his ministers to split up in 2002, which was now a handy instrument of foreign policy. Energy had become a convenient whip with which to punish neighbours. In 2006, a few months after the gas dispute with Ukraine, Russia cut oil supplies to Lithuania after it sold its Mazeikiai refinery to a Polish company rather than to Rosneft. The same year, power lines to Georgia were mysteriously bombed, and Russia refused to allow Georgian investigators to see the evidence or help with repairs. In 2007 Russia cut oil shipments to Estonia following a row over the removal of a Soviet war memorial.

  Towards the end of 2008 another gas conflict with Ukraine was brewing, as Russia again insisted on raising its prices to world levels, and Ukraine refused to pay. This time, with a Western public relations firm on board, the Kremlin tried to pre-empt the bad publicity. They warned Ukraine (and customers farther west) of the impending conflict, and Gazprom sent its top executives on a tour of European capitals to ensure that, if supplies were interrupted, like three years before, people would know it was Ukraine’s fault, not Russia’s. But no one predicted that Putin would go so far as to deliberately cut supplies intended not for Ukraine but for Western Europe.

  Gazprom was owed $2.4 billion by Ukraine for gas already delivered, and wanted to raise the price for 2009 to $250 (and after a few days to $450) per 1,000 cubic metres – a price Ukraine could not pay. On 1 January 2009 Gazprom cut gas supplies, just as it had done in 2006. To make up for the shortfall – again, just as in 2006 – Ukraine began siphoning gas from the export pipelines, and soon customers in Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and other countries noticed a considerable drop in pressure. But this time there was no quick resolution, and European cou
ntries began to panic. Slovakia even considered restarting a mothballed nuclear power station.

  On 5 January Putin took an astonishing decision. He called in the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, plus television cameras, and used the following stilted conversation to announce that for the first time ever Russia would cut gas supplies to customers in Western Europe – mere bystanders to the dispute with Ukraine – in the middle of a freezing winter.

  Alexei Miller: Ukraine has failed to pay its debt for gas supplied in 2008, and that debt amounts to more than $600 million. If things continue like this and Ukraine continues to steal Russian gas, the debt will soon amount to billions of dollars.

  Vladimir Putin: What do you suggest?

  Alexei Miller: It has been suggested to cut the amount of supplies to the border between Russia and Ukraine by exactly the amount Ukraine has stolen, 65.3 million cubic metres, and to subtract the amount of gas stolen in the future.

  Vladimir Putin: Day by day?

  Alexei Miller: Yes, day by day.

  Vladimir Putin: But in that case, our Western European customers will not get the full amount they have contracted for.

  Alexei Miller: Yes, in that case our Western European partners will not be receiving the amounts of gas stolen by Ukraine, but Gazprom will do all it can to compensate for that volume in other ways. We may increase supplies of Russian gas via Belarus and Poland and increase supplies of Russian gas via the Blue Stream to Turkey.

  Vladimir Putin: What about consumers inside Ukraine? They will also be undersupplied. We are talking about large amounts: as far as I remember, Ukraine consumes 110–125 million cubic metres a day. Ukrainian consumers will suffer. I feel sorry for the common people.

  Alexei Miller: According to our reliable information, Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko personally ordered a unilateral suspension of talks with Gazprom on gas supply to Ukraine this year. Apparently, he does not feel sorry for the common people.

  Vladimir Putin: He is not sorry, but we are; everyone should feel sorry for them, because we are related to the people who live there.

  Alexei Miller: We also know that Ukraine produces about 20 billion cubic metres of gas a year, and the amount of stored gas in Ukraine at present exceeds its annual output. Given the good will of the Ukrainian leadership, the people of Ukraine should not suffer.

  Vladimir Putin: I agree. Start reductions as of today.

  Thus it was that Putin, feigning pity for the poor people of Ukraine, ‘agreed to a suggestion’ to cut supplies of gas intended for transit through Ukraine to Central and Western Europe. It was the first time Russia – or the Soviet Union – had ever cut supplies to its customers in the West. The action destroyed Russia’s fundamental argument, that it had always been, and would always be, a reliable energy supplier.

  The decision was the last straw for the European Union. The Americans had long been urging its partners to diversify supplies in order to break Moscow’s stranglehold. Now it became urgent. The EU began exploring every possible alternative energy supplier – from Algeria to Iran to Turkmenistan. Putin’s decision gave fresh impetus to the so-called Nabucco project, a planned pipeline that would bring gas to central Europe from Turkmenistan or Azerbaijan via Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania – avoiding Russia.

  Nabucco was seen as a rival to Russia’s own ‘alternative’ route – the South Stream pipeline, which would supply Russian gas via the Black Sea, Bulgaria and Serbia. Plans were already well advanced, too, for the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea – yet another alternative to supplying Europe via Ukraine. Russia didn’t quite get (or pretended not to get) the Western argument, which was that Russia itself could no longer be trusted as a reliable supplier. Russia put the blame entirely on Ukraine as a transit country, and proffered Nord Stream and South Stream as routes for Russian gas that would avoid potential disruption in the future by Ukraine. The EU feared that this could leave not only Ukraine but also Poland (another transit country) open to blackmail in the future: Russia, faced with a dispute with Poland or Ukraine, would be able to cut gas to those countries while continuing to supply countries further west via the new pipelines. For the Europeans, Nabucco seemed a safer bet, cutting Russia out of the equation altogether. But the fact remained that potential supplies for Nabucco were scarce (Russia had already bought up Turkmen gas for years in advance), and in any case Russia, with its enormous energy resources, was fated to remain a major supplier for the foreseeable future. But after Putin’s intervention on 5 January 2009 it would never be fully trusted.

  It took until 20 January for Europe’s gas to start flowing again, following a deal struck in the middle of the night between Putin and the Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Ukraine would pay European prices, but with a discount for 2009, and in return Ukraine left the fee it charged for transit unchanged. Both sides agreed no longer to use the shady intermediary, Rosukrenergo, linked to Tymoshenko’s erstwhile colleague and now rival, President Yushchenko.

  The postscript to this story comes a year later. In February 2010 Viktor Yanukovych, the man supported in 2004 by Putin but overthrown by the Orange Revolution, was finally elected as Ukraine’s president. The Yushchenko presidency had proved disastrous, riven by internal rivalries, corruption and inept economic policies. Some saw it as the defeat of the Orange Revolution – but that was short-sighted. Yanukovych beat his main rival, Tymoshenko, in a fair election, so democracy itself was not an issue. Moreover, Yanukovych in power proved to be not entirely a Russian poodle. He did, it is true, quickly sign an agreement with President Medvedev to extend Russia’s lease on its Black Sea Fleet base in the Crimea for up to 30 years. In exchange he extracted a multi-year discount on Ukraine’s contracts for Russian gas deliveries. But the price Russia would have to pay for its Crimean base was extortionate. Putin commented: ‘The price we are now asked to pay is out of this world. I would be willing to eat Yanukovych and the prime minister for that sort of money. No military base in the world costs that much. Prices like that simply do not exist. If we look at what the contract would cost us over ten years, it amounts to $40–45 billion.’

  Later, Yanukovych also began to question again how much Ukraine was paying for its Russian gas. (The deal signed by Tymoshenko with Putin in 2009 was deemed so unfavourable that she was jailed for abuse of office.) In summer 2011 Yanukovych demanded that Russia halve its prices, to less than $200. As for Ukraine’s westward orientation, although plans to join NATO were dropped, Yanukovych continued to move towards closer integration with the EU – spurning Putin’s attempts to woo him into a free-trade agreement with Russia.

  The Obama effect

  In the summer and autumn of 2008, while Russia was gazing at its Georgian navel, its leadership failed to notice that on the other side of the world something important was happening. George W. Bush, Putin’s nemesis for the past eight years, would soon stand down, and there was every chance that the November presidential election would be won by a young, liberal black man who was enthralling the entire world. Firstly, the Russians did not believe that a black candidate could possibly beat Senator John McCain. But they also refused to believe that if Barack Obama did win anything would change. I remember sitting in a Kremlin office trying to explain to officials that an Obama victory looked very likely and that it could present a real opportunity to improve relations. They should start thinking now about how to reach out to him. The reaction was a smirk and a shrug of the shoulders: ‘Nothing will change. It’s all the same people.’

  Russia really was stuck in a time-warp. It was not just the West that still treated Russia as essentially a communist country minus a few of the trimmings. Russia also suffered from a world view shaped by Cold War-era Pravda cartoons of Uncle Sam feeding the ‘military-industrial complex’ with one hand and launching missiles at the Soviet Union with the other. For them, Barack Obama was just a product of the system, and nothing would change.

  On 4 November Obama was elected, to a parade of delirious headlines almos
t everywhere. Whatever else was true, Obama was not George W. Bush, and for many people it seemed like the dawn of a new era. President Medvedev had been preparing for his first state-of-the-nation speech for some weeks – it was first announced for late October, then rescheduled for 5 November. As news of Obama’s victory came in, the Kremlin’s PR firm, Ketchum, quickly sent a recommendation that this was the ideal chance to make an overture to the new president, with some warm words about future cooperation. But it was not just Ketchum’s advice that failed to get through; it was as if nobody had bothered to pass on the news that Obama had won.

  Medvedev spoke for an hour and half in the dazzling white hall of the Great Kremlin Palace, but he did not even mention Obama’s name, far less congratulate him. He did, however, blame US foreign policy for the war in Georgia, and he announced that Russia might deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, bordering Poland, to neutralise Bush’s missile defence system.

  The next day’s headlines recorded a missed chance. ‘Russian President Dmitry Medvedev orders missiles deployed in Europe as world hails Obama,’ said the London Times. ‘Russia gives Obama brisk warning,’ said the Washington Post.

  It has often been pointed out that Russia’s foreign policy is essentially reactive, and this was certainly largely the case throughout the Putin years. He made few, if any, initiatives off his own bat: as we have seen, he expected NATO to ‘invite’ Russia to join, he responded to the 9/11 attacks with positive gestures, and to NATO expansion and missile defence plans with negative ones – but he rarely came out with initiatives of his own for others to react to. The same was clearly going to be the case now: Russia’s foreign policy might change, but only if the Americans made the first move.