The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  As 2007 unfolded, the question of who would succeed Putin when his second term ended in 2008 weighed increasingly on the Russian elite and clogged up much of the bilateral bandwidth. It was always a mistake to assume anything about Putin, except that he would always do all he could to keep people guessing. There was certainly the possibility that he would engineer a constitutional change to permit a third consecutive term; Duma votes were not exactly a prohibitive challenge for him. But most indications I had from him, as well as from Sergey Ivanov, Surkov, and others, were that Putin at least cared enough about appearances that he would step down. Surkov hinted broadly on several occasions that Putin might well return for a third, nonconsecutive term in 2012, which the constitution permitted. It was also likely that no matter who became president in 2008, Putin would remain the power behind the throne, in whatever role he chose. Nevertheless, it would not be a small thing for a relatively young, healthy, politically unchallenged leader to leave office voluntarily for the first time in a thousand years of Russian history.

  Putin was not, however, in any rush to show his hand, and hardly ready to start crating his papers for the presidential library. Medvedev and Sergey Ivanov were clearly the early front-runners. Medvedev, then forty-two, seemed the more modern candidate, but he was also seen as a little soft, an uneasy fit in the rough-and-tumble world of Russian elite politics and international affairs. Ivanov, then fifty-four, was the more traditional model, like Putin a veteran of the KGB, with years of experience as minister of defense; but he was also seen as a little hard, his ambition and self-confidence an uneasy fit for the other hard men in Putin’s circle, and perhaps for Putin himself.

  Medvedev had been given a boost at the end of 2005, when Putin moved him from the Kremlin to become first deputy prime minister. He had a chance to mold a more independent political image, and was given charge of the “national priority projects,” which targeted significant chunks of the federal budget toward improvement of housing, healthcare, and education. In January 2007, he led Russia’s delegation to Davos and gave a well-received speech. But Putin was not content to become a lame duck so early. In February 2007, he moved Sergey Ivanov from Defense to become another deputy prime minister. His portfolio focused on reorganizing the aviation, shipping, and high-tech industries, and also included the increasingly profitable arms trade. It also freed him from the endless controversies of the Ministry of Defense, where hazing deaths of recruits and other scandals were political deadweights. Both Ivanov and Medvedev seemed well positioned.

  Putin’s concern that outside influence might undermine his orchestration of events bordered on the paranoid. The sharpest exchange I ever had with him came in a private conversation at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in early June 2007. He accused the embassy and American NGOs of funneling money and support to critics of the Kremlin. “Outside interference in our elections,” he said, “will not be tolerated. We know you have diplomats and people who pretend to be diplomats traveling all over Russia encouraging oppositionists.” With the most even tone I could manage, I replied that the outcome of Russia’s elections was obviously for Russians alone to decide. The United States had no business supporting particular candidates or parties, and simply would not do so. We would, however, continue to express support for a fair process, just as we did any place in the world. Putin listened, offered a tight-lipped smile, and said, “Don’t think we won’t react to outside interference.”17

  He was convinced we were bent on tilting the political playing field in Russia, and drew a straight line from the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003–4, which he genuinely believed were the product of American conspiracies, to his own 2008 succession drama. The rich irony of Putin’s threat is not lost on me more than a decade later, after Russia’s brazen interference in the 2016 American presidential election.

  As 2007 drew to a close, Putin finally tipped his hand and declared that he would support Medvedev as his successor in the March 2008 presidential election. The logic of that choice became clearer in the next couple months, as rumors swirled that Putin would remain in government as prime minister—perfectly acceptable under the Russian constitution. It made sense to have the more malleable and less experienced Medvedev as his partner in this new “tandem” arrangement; it was hard to see Sergey Ivanov being comfortable in that role, or Putin comfortable with him. Russia’s political landscape appeared to be stabilizing. U.S.-Russian relations, on the other hand, were heading in the opposite direction.

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  THE LIST OF irritants between us continued to grow, but several stood out. One was Kosovo, where the United States had championed a UN-led process to organize Kosovar independence from Serbia. The effort made practical and moral sense. The Kosovars overwhelmingly wanted independence, the status quo was unsustainable, and long delay invited another eruption of violence in the Balkans. For Putin, Kosovo’s independence brought back bad memories of Russian impotence, and loomed as a test of how different his Russia was from Yeltsin’s.

  He also had worries, not entirely unfounded, that Kosovo’s independence would set off a chain reaction of pressures, with some in the Russian elite urging him to recognize the independence of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and other disputed territories in the former Soviet Union. Putin was not at all shy about using those conflicts as levers, especially with Saakashvili, but his preference was to keep them frozen. He also knew that separatist tendencies in the North Caucasus, inside the Russian Federation itself, had not been fully extinguished, and he did not want to see them rekindled. “The notion that Russia can’t be pushed around again as it was in 1999, and that the issue of North Caucasus separatism has been settled,” I wrote in the summer of 2007, “are two of the cardinal elements of Putin’s own sense of legacy, and he will fiercely resist revisiting either of them.”18 Nevertheless, the UN plan authored by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari was moving down the track, with Kosovo’s independence within sight by the end of 2007.

  A second problem was the question of NATO expansion, this time to Ukraine and Georgia. There had been two waves of NATO expansion since the end of the Cold War: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were offered membership in the second half of the 1990s, and then the Baltic states and four more Central European states a few years later. Yeltsin had gnashed his teeth over the first wave, but couldn’t do much about it. Putin offered little resistance to Baltic membership, amid all the other preoccupations of his first term. Georgia, and especially Ukraine, were different animals altogether. There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard against any steps in the direction of NATO membership for either state. In Washington, however, there was a kind of geopolitical and ideological inertia at work, with strong interest from Vice President Cheney and large parts of the interagency bureaucracy in a “Membership Action Plan” (MAP) for Ukraine and Georgia. Key European allies, in particular Germany and France, were dead set against offering it. They were disinclined to add to mounting friction between Moscow and the West—and unprepared to commit themselves formally and militarily to the defense of Tbilisi or Kyiv against the Russians. The Bush administration understood the objections, but still felt it could finesse the issue.

  Completing the trifecta of troubles was the vexing issue of missile defense. Anxious about American superiority in missile defense technology since the Soviet era, the Russians were always nervous that U.S. advances in the field, whatever their stated purposes, would put Moscow at a serious strategic disadvantage. Putin had swallowed the U.S. abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty early in the Bush administration, but resented it deeply as another example, in his eyes, of the United States throwing its weight around at Russia’s expense. By 2007, the United States had begun fielding missile defense capabilities in Alaska and California, aimed at the emerging North Korean threat. More worrying for Putin were American plans to build new radar and interceptor sites in
the Czech Republic and Poland to counter a potential Iranian missile threat. Putin didn’t buy the argument that an Iranian threat was imminent; and even if it was, his specialists told him (not unreasonably) that it would be technically smarter to deploy new missile defense systems in the southeast Mediterranean, or Italy, and that Aegis shipborne systems could be an effective ingredient. No amount of argument about the technological limitations of systems based in the Czech Republic and Poland against theoretical Russian targets, however soundly based, swayed Putin and his innately suspicious military. Their longer-term concern was not so much about the particular technologies that might be deployed in new NATO states in Central Europe as it was about what those technologies might mean as part of a future, globalized American missile defense system. At the core of their opposition was also the weight of history. For many in Russia, especially in Putin’s orbit of security and intelligence hardliners, you could build a Disney theme park in Poland and they would find it faintly threatening.

  I had done my best over the previous two and a half years to signal the brewing problems in the relationship and what might be done to head them off. I knew I was straining the patience of some in Washington, who chafed at my warnings of troubles to come when they were consumed with the challenges that had already arrived. I decided, however, that I owed Secretary Rice and the White House one more attempt to collect my concerns and recommendations in one place.

  On a typically dreary Friday afternoon in early February 2008, with snow falling steadily against the gray Moscow sky outside my office window, I sat down and composed a long personal email to Secretary Rice, which she later shared with Steve Hadley and Bob Gates. While more formal diplomatic cables still had their uses, classified emails were faster, more direct, and more discreet—in this case a better way to convey the urgency and scope of my concerns.

  “The next couple months will be among the most consequential in recent U.S.-Russian relations,” I wrote. “We face three potential trainwrecks: Kosovo, MAP for Ukraine/Georgia, and missile defense. We’ve got a high-priority problem with Iran that will be extremely hard…to address without the Russians. We’ve got a chance to do something enduring with the Russians on nuclear cooperation…and we’ve got an opportunity to get off on a better foot with a reconfigured Russian leadership after Medvedev’s likely election, and to help the Russians get across the finish line into WTO this year, which is among the most practical things we can do to promote the long-term prospects for political and economic modernization in this proud, prickly and complicated society.” I tried to be clear about what should be done:

  My view is that we can only manage one of those three trainwrecks without doing real damage to a relationship we don’t have the luxury of ignoring. From my admittedly parochial perspective here, it’s hard to see how we could get the key Europeans to support us on all three at the same time. I’d opt for plowing ahead resolutely on Kosovo; deferring MAP for Ukraine or Georgia until a stronger foundation is laid; and going to Putin directly while he’s still in the Presidency to try and cut a deal on missile defense, as part of a broader security framework.

  I fully understand how difficult a decision to hold off on MAP will be. But it’s equally hard to overstate the strategic consequences of a premature MAP offer, especially to Ukraine. Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze….It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. On Georgia, the combination of Kosovo independence and a MAP offer would likely lead to recognition of Abkhazia, however counterproductive that might be to Russia’s own long-term interests in the Caucasus. The prospects of subsequent Russian-Georgian armed conflict would be high.

  I pushed my luck a little in the next passage. If, in the end, we decided to push MAP offers for Ukraine and Georgia, I wrote, “you can probably stop reading here. I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.” On missile defense, I urged that we not be in a rush on the Polish and Czech deployment plans, continue to seek ways in which we might find a basis for cooperation with Russia, and work harder to link this issue to Russian collaboration in countering the Iranian missile and nuclear threats—which were, after all, the proximate reasons for our initiative. If we could get the Russians to work more closely with us and slow or block Iranian advances, that would serve the main strategic purpose that animated our plans in Central Europe.

  I repeated my arguments for pressing ahead on economic and nuclear cooperation as Putin prepared to launch the “tandem” arrangement with Medvedev. We ought to engage the Russians on the possibility of a new strategic arms reduction accord, beyond the START agreement that would soon expire. We should continue to work hard on nonproliferation challenges. Iran was one important example. North Korea was another. The Russians had far less direct influence in Pyongyang than did the Chinese, but wanted to play a role.

  My case for economic cooperation was still built around WTO accession and supporting American trade and investment. I always thought that over the longer term, that was one of the best of the limited bets available to us to advance the president’s freedom agenda in Russia, helping slowly to deepen the self-interest of Russians in the rule of law. “That wouldn’t change the reality,” I noted, “that Russia is a deeply authoritarian and overcentralized state today, whose dismal record on human rights and political freedoms deserves our criticism.” But over time it might reinforce the instincts for protecting private property and market-driven opportunity that were slowly building a middle class, and open up a massively undertapped market for American companies.19

  Rice was appreciative and encouraged me to keep pressing my views. Both she and Gates shared at least some of my concerns on MAP, but I sensed that the debate in Washington was still tilting toward a strong, legacy-building effort to engineer a MAP offer for Ukraine and Georgia at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. There was similar fin-de-administration momentum behind the missile defense project in Poland and the Czech Republic, now that Kosovo’s independence was a done deal.

  Both Rice and Gates, and President Bush himself, had spent a lot of time in 2007 trying to engage the Russians on all these issues. Gates visited in April, not long after his encounter with Putin at Munich, and displayed a sure feel for the Russians, the product of decades of experience during the Cold War and his own savvy, pragmatic judgment and good humor. The latter was especially useful in his formal conversations with the new defense minister, Anatoliy Serdyukov, a former furniture trader from St. Petersburg who had endeared himself to Putin as chief of the federal tax collection service, and implementer of the brutal demolition of Mikhail Khodorkovsky several years before. Serdyukov was entirely unschooled in defense matters or diplomacy, and mostly read his talking points from a stack of index cards. Gates parried his points respectfully, occasionally passing me notes with his unvarnished thoughts about our host, who he concluded should have stuck to furniture sales.

  Rice, determined to do what she could to ease tensions, came to Moscow in May. President Bush saw Putin on the margins of the G-8 summit in Germany in June, where Putin suggested the use of a Russian-operated radar facility in Azerbaijan, which he intended as an alternative, not a complement, to a Central European site. When Putin came to Kennebunkport, Maine, in July, the Russian leader added the possibility of using an existing early-warning facility at Armavir, in southern Russia. The two leaders agreed that their experts should study th
e ideas, in hopes of developing a joint approach. Extensive working-level discussions ensued. The limited technical capacity of the two Russian-proposed sites was one concern; the bigger issue was that the Russians saw their offers as a substitute for U.S. plans in Central Europe, while Washington was willing to consider them (at most) as add-ons.

  The Kennebunkport meeting showed both the cordiality of the Bush-Putin relationship and its limitations. Relaxed and gracious at their summer home, the Bush family wrapped Putin and his delegation in warmth and hospitality. I told President Bush afterward that I thought Putin had been genuinely touched by the invitation, and he was not someone easily touched by gestures of any kind. But I left feeling that Russians and Americans were still talking past one another and hurtling down the track toward a wreck of one kind or another.

  In March 2008, just before Medvedev was elected as president, I had an unusual conversation with Putin, which only reinforced my worries. President Bush had asked me to deliver a message to Putin. Its contents were straightforward: outlining again our position on Kosovo; emphasizing our hope that we could still work out some acceptable formula on missile defense; indicating that any move forward at the Bucharest summit toward NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia should not be seen as threatening; and underscoring our continued commitment to Russia’s accession to the WTO. President Bush also confirmed that he’d accept Putin’s invitation to visit Sochi and hope they’d take advantage of their last meeting as presidents to discuss a “strategic framework” to guide the U.S.-Russian relationship.