The high point of the reset, in many ways, was Medvedev’s visit to the United States in June 2010. New START had been ratified and signed. A strong new Security Council resolution signaled U.S.-Russian cooperation on Iran. Russian logistical support had enabled the president’s Afghan surge. Medvedev’s political stock was still dwarfed by Putin’s in Russia, but he clearly saw an opportunity to show that he could promote Russian interests on the world stage—with his cordial relationship with Obama as exhibit A. That might be his ticket to a second term as president, amid rumors already beginning to swirl that Putin would return to the Kremlin instead.
Medvedev began his trip to the United States in Silicon Valley. He was intent upon developing Russia’s technology sector, and had already launched a kind of tech hothouse just outside Moscow, aimed at incubating innovative new companies and technologies. Supported by the Russian state and a handful of oligarchs, it was a top-down model far removed from the West Coast garages in which Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had started their ascent, with little of the freewheeling entrepreneurial spirit that energized Silicon Valley. McFaul arranged for Medvedev to speak at Stanford, which he did with distinctly un-Kremlin-like flair, wearing blue jeans and reading his remarks from an iPad. He interacted with tech pioneers from Apple, Google, and Cisco, as well as with young Russian émigrés working in the Valley. For someone like me, who had long argued that Russia needed urgently to diversify its economy beyond what came out of the ground, it seemed like a hopeful moment.
Obama’s conversations in Washington with Medvedev were similarly encouraging, focused on creating economic ballast that might support the relationship beyond the reset. They agreed to work together to complete Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
Even a spy scandal, which became public soon after Medvedev returned home, did not derail the reset. U.S. investigators had been piecing together for some months information about a network of Russian “sleeper” agents—Russian nationals who had taken on false American identities and burrowed into American society, preparing to eventually take on active espionage tasks. It was a story that later became the basis for a popular television series, The Americans—whose protagonists were a good deal more accomplished than the actual Russian sleepers. Nevertheless, the long-term risk they posed was real. After long sessions in the Situation Room in which we debated the options, the president decided to pursue a swap shortly after the Medvedev visit. The eleven sleeper agents were arrested, and then traded for four individuals imprisoned by the Russians on espionage charges. It was in some respects a classic Cold War tale—and a reminder that, for all the apparent promise of the reset, ours was still a fraught relationship.
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IN 2011, THINGS began to get a lot more fraught and the reset began to lose altitude. Ever since the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, Moscow had grown increasingly apprehensive about popular uprisings that might soon wash up on the walls of the Kremlin. The Arab Spring—the revolutions that erupted in Tunisia, Egypt, and across the region in early 2011—sent much of the Russian leadership into a cold sweat, as did Washington’s evident sympathy for popular movements in the Arab world.
The case of Qaddafi’s Libya was particularly challenging. As a revolt spread across Libya, Qaddafi threatened to slaughter rebels in Benghazi and other cities where the uprising was strongest. Key European states called for outside intervention to prevent massive bloodletting. In a break from past practice, the Arab League also was outspoken in its call for the United Nations to act and authorize intervention to protect civilians. The Russians supported a first Security Council resolution in February. And then in mid-March, after a direct request delivered persuasively by Vice President Biden to Medvedev in Moscow, Russia abstained and allowed passage of a second resolution authorizing “all necessary means” to safeguard Libyan civilians.
I accompanied the vice president on that trip, and the contrast between his conversations with Medvedev and those with Putin was striking. Medvedev acknowledged the humanitarian risks, and hinted that he was inclined to acquiesce in a limited military mission. He was also invested in Obama by this point, and that seemed to be a factor in his thinking. Putin was neither invested in Obama nor overly concerned about humanitarian risks. His main concern was the chaos that might result from outside intervention, and the precedent that would be set if another autocrat was toppled. Putin was dyspeptic about American policy in the Middle East, and sharply critical of our “abandonment” of Mubarak a month earlier.
While Putin clearly had serious doubts about the wisdom of catering to American preferences amid the Arab Spring, he deferred to Medvedev on the decision to abstain. If it didn’t end well, he made clear he would add yet another black mark in his estimation of Medvedev’s judgment and capacity to protect Russian interests in a rough and cold-blooded world—and another in his long list of grievances about American duplicity. In the fall of 2011, after Western military strikes that soon drifted beyond the original intent of the Security Council resolutions, Qaddafi was overthrown. In gruesome footage that Putin reportedly viewed repeatedly, rebels caught the Libyan dictator hiding in a drainage pipe and beat him to death.
Putin worried that Russia’s vulnerabilities had grown, not diminished, since he had left the presidency, and concluded it was time to take back full control of the reins. The 2008 global financial crisis had hit Russia hard, sending hydrocarbon prices plummeting and curbing the high growth rates that Putin had enjoyed during his first two terms in the Kremlin. Although from Putin’s perspective the war in Georgia and the sympathetic government of Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine had put the brakes on the erosion of Russian influence in the former Soviet Union, the wider world looked more uncertain, with authoritarian leaderships falling across the Middle East and the United States throwing its weight behind regime changes. His self-assurance reinforced by years of sycophancy from the Russian elite and enviable public approval ratings, Putin concluded with the hubris that autocracy breeds that his was the only strong hand that could right Russia’s course and steer it ahead. He announced in September his decision to run for president again in the March 2012 elections, and that Medvedev would replace him as prime minister.
Putin misjudged the reaction among the rising urban middle class in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other major Russian cities. Resentful of his fait accompli, and restive for economic modernization and a more serious effort to combat corruption, they helped deliver a blow to his ruling party in the December 2011 Duma elections, which won only 49 percent of the vote, far less than its 64 percent total in 2007. When allegations of vote rigging and manipulation to produce even that unimpressive result began to build immediately after the elections, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg in protest. Putin was surprised, angry, and more than a little unnerved.10 By instinct and professional training a control freak, he was discovering that the growing middle class that he had helped create over the last decade wanted more than just consumerism. It also wanted a political voice.
I warned Clinton that there was more combustibility ahead. Putin and the tough guys around him were likely to invent or exaggerate American involvement in Russian affairs, partly to deflect attention from the unexpected domestic storm he had barreled into. It didn’t take long for that to materialize. When Clinton made public comments critical of the conduct of the Duma elections—consistent in tone and substance with what we would have said in similar circumstances anyplace in the world—Putin lashed out, accusing her of sending the “signal” that drew demonstrators into the streets, and the State Department of quietly supporting opposition parties. Putin had a remarkable capacity for storing up grievances and slights and assembling them to fit his narrative of the West trying to keep Russia down. Clinton’s criticism would rank high in his litany—and generate a personal animus that led directly to his meddling against her candidacy in the
2016 U.S. presidential election. Putin was an apostle of payback.
In early January 2012, Mike McFaul walked into this nasty set of circumstances as our new ambassador to Russia. He was well prepared for the job—an excellent Russian speaker with long years of experience in Russian affairs, and the White House architect of the reset. By the time of his arrival in Moscow, however, the Kremlin was in an increasingly edgy and vindictive mood, and Mike’s hopes to start slowly and tread carefully proved elusive. I wanted him to get off on a good footing, and I intended to use a long-planned visit to help. The inadvertent result, however, was to help make his life even more complicated.
I arrived in Moscow during McFaul’s first week as ambassador. We made the rounds of senior officials in the Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry, and encountered nothing unusual in our conversations. On my second morning, just before my departure, we met first with a group of political opposition leaders and then with a number of civil society activists. These kinds of sessions were a regular part of any such visit, and I had taken part in them throughout many years of service at the embassy and as a visitor from Washington. I don’t recall much that was unusual about those conversations either, nor did we go out of our way to call attention to them. We mostly listened.
The Kremlin was poised to seize on any such contacts, however routine, as evidence of American plotting. State television ran a long, vituperative piece that same night, alleging that Russian oppositionists had come to see Mike and me to “get their instructions” for the further disruption of Russian politics. This began a carefully choreographed campaign against McFaul, whose proud history prior to government service of study and support for democracy movements made him a convenient target for the Kremlin. As Medvedev and Surkov later acknowledged, McFaul’s arrival was a perfect opportunity to manufacture a narrative about American meddling and rouse Putin’s nationalistic political base in the run-up to the March presidential elections.11 The nastiness never stopped, continuing long after Putin’s election. It was a campaign clearly planned before McFaul’s arrival or my visit, and would have been triggered at some early point. I just wish I hadn’t provided such an immediate and visible trigger.
Relations relapsed quickly in 2012. Putin returned as president after winning 63 percent of the vote in March, but pointedly declined to come to the G-8 summit in Washington in May, sending Medvedev instead. We were increasingly at loggerheads over how to manage the reverberations of the Arab Spring as the Kremlin clung to its client in Damascus and resisted outside pressure for a political transition. With American support, Russia finally joined the World Trade Organization in August. That forced the issue of repeal of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, without which the United States couldn’t benefit from Russia’s WTO accession. Repeal also reinforced a push in Congress to hit back at the Russian leadership in other ways—especially through the passage of the Magnitsky Act in December, which sanctioned Russian officials implicated in the terrible prison death of a young lawyer who had uncovered evidence of high-level corruption.
Just before stepping down as secretary of state in February 2013, Clinton sent a memo to President Obama cautioning that relations with Russia would get worse before they got better, and that Putin’s return to the Kremlin had brought the curtain down on the reset. We would still manage to work with the Russians on the Iran nuclear negotiations, and Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, would labor mightily to reach an understanding with Moscow on Syria. But the overall downward drift was hard to brake. In August 2013, the Russians granted temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor who had leaked massive amounts of highly classified material, infuriating Washington. In response, Obama canceled a planned bilateral summit with Putin on the margins of a G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg in September. It seemed like we had hit bottom in the relationship.
Then Putin’s pugnacity in Ukraine took us much deeper. Throughout 2013, the plodding, corrupt Yanukovich government in Kyiv was the object of a tug-of-war between the European Union and Russia. The EU sought to engage Ukraine in an association agreement, the first step on a long and uncertain road to membership. Putin’s main geopolitical aspiration was the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union, a collection of former Soviet states that Russia could control—and that would be hollow without Ukraine. For Putin, Ukraine would never be just another country and tethering it to the West was an existential issue for him. He was determined to play hardball, convinced that Russia’s future as a great power depended upon predominant influence in Ukraine. Yanukovich, whom Putin viewed as weak-willed, predictably vacillated, torn between his Russian patrons and a population solidly in favor of association with the EU and the long-term economic benefits that would flow from it. Finally, he backed away from a scheduled signing event with the EU in late November and accepted a $15 billion subsidy from Putin to opt for the Eurasian Economic Union.
Disgruntled Ukrainians poured into the Maidan, the historic main square in Kyiv, setting up camp and venting their frustration with Yanukovich. A full-fledged political crisis ensued. Violence broke out in February 2014, with government snipers killing several protestors and hard-right oppositionists responsible for the deaths of a number of police officers. An EU mediation effort produced a last-minute agreement to deescalate, but Yanukovich—by now fearful for his own life—fled to eastern Ukraine and then across the border to Russia. The protestors celebrated, the Rada impeached Yanukovich and elected an interim president, and this all seemed to be yet another historic chance for Ukrainians to shape a more promising future.
At that moment, I was in Sochi, leading the U.S. delegation to the closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Mike McFaul was there with me, only a couple days from the end of his tour in Moscow. We quickly agreed that Putin wasn’t going to accept quietly the demise of Yanukovich and all his hopes for a deferential Ukraine. We tried to arrange a meeting with Putin in Sochi, but he was in no mood to talk. The White House asked me to stop in Kyiv, which I did two days later. The mood was exuberant but apprehensive, with senior officials worried about what Putin might do next. I went down to the Maidan one cold evening and visited the makeshift medical clinic that had been set up by protesters at St. Michael’s Monastery near the square. You could feel the pride among the volunteer doctors and nurses, and the wounded demonstrators who were still there. I told Secretary Kerry that I thought this might be the moment when Ukraine got it right. It seemed that hope might finally triumph over experience in a country whose landscape was littered with two decades of political failure, squabbling leaders, endemic corruption, Russian meddling, and unfulfilled expectations.
Soon after I left Kyiv, Russia’s “little green men” began to appear in Crimea, the first of a wave of Russian military and security personnel in unmarked uniforms who would occupy Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Putin formally announced the annexation of Crimea in mid-March, and stepped up Russian military and separatist activity in the Donbass, the heavily industrialized swath of southeastern Ukraine long home to many ethnic Russians. Putin’s message was typically unsubtle: If Russia couldn’t have a deferential government in Kyiv, plan B was a dysfunctional Ukraine, in which the Kremlin used an annexed Crimea and a violent and unstable Donbass to exert leverage over Kyiv. The Western response was a series of sanctions against Russia, demonstrating a solidarity between the United States and key European allies that Putin didn’t expect. It helped blunt his push into the Donbass and relieve the pressure on Kyiv, even if it could do little in the short term to reverse the annexation of Crimea.
In the early summer of 2014, after a difficult phone call between Obama and Putin, I was sent along with Jake Sullivan, then the national security advisor to Vice President Biden, to meet quietly with two senior Russian representatives—one from the Foreign Ministry and the other from the Kremlin—and see if back-channel conversations might lead anywhere useful, particularly on the Ukraine crisis. Over a long day in Geneva, at a
hotel overlooking the lake, we went round and round. The senior Russian diplomat was an old friend, but had little to offer. The Kremlin official specialized in Borscht Belt humor and meandering, politically incorrect stories about Russia and its neighbors. Echoing Vladimir Putin to George W. Bush in 2008, he insisted that “you Americans don’t understand that Ukraine is not a real country. Some parts are really Central Europe, and some are really Russian, and very little is actually Ukrainian. Don’t kid yourselves.” His smarmy, patronizing air wasn’t very endearing. “And you shouldn’t kid yourselves,” I replied. “You’ve managed to create an even stronger sense of Ukrainian nationalism than existed before. You’ve swallowed up two million Crimeans, but made the other forty-two million people a lot more Ukrainian, and a lot more determined to keep out from under your influence.”
Jake and I took turns losing our patience as the day wore on and the conversation went nowhere. We left discouraged about the near-term prospects for implementation of the Minsk agreement that the Germans and French had been hammering out with the Russians and Ukrainians. Our bigger concern was that the Russians might up the ante and increase military pressure in the Donbass rather than deescalate. We sent a note back to the president that night outlining the Russian failure to take seriously this back channel and our own failure to convince them of the wisdom of taking the diplomatic off-ramp we tried to telegraph.
The reset was long dead.
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THE ARC OF relations with Russia in the Obama era was achingly familiar. Inheriting the mutual acrimony of the war in Georgia, Obama made some tangible early progress in the relationship. We took significant strides together on Iran, Afghanistan, and strategic arms reductions. We helped the Russians finally overcome the last barriers to formal WTO accession, but never succeeded in putting much economic weight in the relationship, certainly not compared to China, nor even to the halting promise of economic ties with India. Early cooperation between us in response to the Arab Spring collapsed in recrimination, especially over Libya. For all the potential of the president’s rapport with Dmitry Medvedev, we were never able to sustain an effective connection to Putin. There was also a certain hubris in the notion that we could somehow enhance Medvedev’s political position by investing in the relationship between Obama and someone so utterly dependent on Putin for his role and influence.
The Back Channel Page 31