by John McCain
Democrats saw my statements as an opportunity to suggest that, like Saakashvili, I had an impulsive nature. After Iraq, they reasoned, we don’t want another impulsive hawk in charge of things. But the charge didn’t do much damage. We ticked up a little in the polls, which was largely credited to my high profile during the crisis. I was repeatedly invited to express reservations about some of the Georgian president’s decisions. But I wouldn’t criticize a friendly government while it was under attack, an undeserved and premeditated attack, by a mutual adversary. On the contrary, throughout the duration of the Russo-Georgia war, I was regularly on the phone with Saakashvili, who called almost daily. He asked my advice, and I gave it to him. He couldn’t win the war. I knew that. He couldn’t count on the West to help him win it, just to help him get out of it, and I advised him to seek and cooperate with that help. He asked me to urge Washington to be more supportive, and I did, strenuously. He was surprised by the discovery that the nations of Europe, which he wanted his nation to emulate and associate with, valued their relations with Russia more than the territorial integrity of a friendly democracy. I told him that they would regret that misplaced allegiance someday, and they mostly have. Too late for Misha, he’s long out of power in Georgia. But not, perhaps, for the country he tried hard to liberalize and hold together in the face of open and covert aggression from its former imperial master, and the audacious despot who ordered it.
• • •
With the inauguration of the Obama administration came its vaunted reset of relations with Russia, which sought Russian cooperation on arms control and other security issues at the cost of not troubling Moscow too much over its endemic corruption, repression, and intimidation of its neighbors. Sanctions imposed by the Bush administration the year before were lifted. Two missile defense sites under construction in Poland and the Czech Republic would be canceled to placate Russian objections despite the enormous domestic political challenge their location had been for the two host governments, who were upset by the reversal, to say the least. The following year we would sign a new strategic arms agreement with Russia, which required significant reductions in the U.S. arsenal but not Russia’s. NATO enlargement was largely shelved. Albania and Croatia were admitted in April 2009, but they had been formally invited to join the year before. No other new members were added to the alliance for the duration of the Obama administration, although Montenegro was invited near the end of 2015, and would formally join in June 2017.
My old friend Joe Biden, the new vice president, introduced the new policy at the Munich Conference in February 2009. “The United States rejects the notion that NATO’s gain is Russia’s loss,” he declared, “or that Russia’s strength is NATO’s weakness.” Explain that to Putin, I thought to myself. There wasn’t anything terribly offensive in the speech, and Joe noted areas where we would continue to have serious disagreements. It surely wasn’t a profoundly idiotic statement as was President Sarkozy’s assertion at the same conference that Russia didn’t constitute a military threat to the European Union and NATO. But the implication that much of the strain in our relations with Russia was simply caused by a misunderstanding was, as Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, put it, “naive.”
Hillary Clinton, the new secretary of state, met with her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva the next month, and handed him a big red “reset” button, although she was rumored to have been somewhat skeptical of the initiative, as I know Defense Secretary Bob Gates, held over from the Bush administration, was. By the time Hillary left office in 2013 after the President’s reelection, she was counseling the administration to snub Putin, and not “flatter [him] with high-level attention.” By then, she had plenty of experience with how the Kremlin boss interpreted friendliness as weakness. She concluded, correctly, that “strength and resolve were the only language Putin would understand.” But she was leaving office, and President Obama and her successor, John Kerry, didn’t heed the advice.
It’s fair to recognize welcome developments the reset might have encouraged. Russia agreed to let us fly military supplies to Afghanistan through their airspace. We had been flying over Kyrgyzstan, but Moscow had pressured the Kyrgyz to withdraw permission. Russia agreed to join the international sanctions regime against Iran. The administration would also credit the new START treaty to the reset. I didn’t think that was a good deal, so I wouldn’t include this among welcome developments. I didn’t see many other benefits to our outreach to Russia. Nor did I expect any. Putin’s personality wasn’t the kind to be modified by positive reinforcement, which the advocates of the reset would eventually realize.
In September 2010, Bill Browder, whose hedge fund Hermitage Capital had been the largest private investment firm in Russia, came to see me with a tragic tale to tell. Putin had expelled Browder from Russia in 2005 after Browder had publicly complained about rampant corruption in the state-owned Russian companies he had invested in. Interior Ministry police raided his Moscow offices, seized his corporate records, used them to forge change-in-ownership contracts, and transferred ownership of Hermitage’s assets, which were used to create a billion dollars in phony tax liabilities, and, in one instance, fraudulently claim a refund for $230 million in taxes Hermitage had paid when Browder was in control. Browder hired a Russian tax lawyer and auditor, Sergei Magnitsky, to get to the bottom of it, which he did. Magnitsky’s discoveries and subsequent testimony implicated Interior Ministry police, government officials, judges, and organized criminals in a massive fraud conspiracy. For his honesty and courage, he was arrested by some of the same police he had accused, imprisoned without trial, denied visits from his family, and beaten savagely to get him to withdraw his complaints. He never recanted or signed a false confession. On the contrary, throughout his imprisonment he continued to file complaints about his abusers and the perpetrators of the fraud he had uncovered. His conditions were awful, and his injuries and various illnesses were left untreated. In November 2009, after nearly a year in prison, he complained of severe abdominal pains, and was taken to the prison medical facility, and denied treatment. A quasi-official human rights committee reported to Medvedev two years later that rather than treating his stomach pains, Sergei Magnitsky was beaten with rubber truncheons by eight prison guards and orderlies, and then left to die alone in his cell. He was only thirty-seven years old, married, and the father of two children. The Russian government announced he had died of heart disease. Several of the people responsible for his death were promoted.
Browder went to war against the bastards who had murdered his lawyer. In that pursuit, he worked with Representative Jim McGovern and Senator Ben Cardin, both Democrats, to introduce legislation that would subject sixty Russians implicated in Sergei’s arrest and death, and in the crimes he had uncovered, to a U.S. visa and banking ban. They needed a Republican co-sponsor. Browder told me Sergei’s story in a very calm and matter-of-fact way, which gave it an even more powerful effect, and I was moved. I asked him what I could do to help, and he explained the sanctions legislation, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, and asked me to sponsor it. I said “I’m in,” and told an aide to contact Ben Cardin’s office and put me on the bill. Thus began a two-year fight to get the Obama administration to let us impress on Russia that there were misdeeds the U.S. would not ignore even in the interests of a reset relationship. To punish this misdeed, we intended to offend the mob-boss mentality of the Kremlin where it hurt the most, by cutting off access to the banks and real estate where they stashed their wealth, and the places where they enjoyed flaunting it. And we would encourage other Western governments to do the same. I don’t think I had realized in the beginning how much that would matter to Putin Inc. I soon discovered it mattered a lot from the ferocity of Putin’s opposition to the sanctions—when he spoke about them sometimes he was visibly angry—and from discussions with prominent Russian dissidents, Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov among them, who assured me nothing was more likely to upset the
m than telling them they couldn’t travel, invest, and spend their money lavishly wherever they wanted, which for most of them was the whole purpose of stealing all that money.
We introduced the bill in May 2011, with a long list of co-sponsors. Impressed by the testimony of activists who identified numerous other transgressions against human rights in Russia, we widened the scope of the bill beyond those involved in the false arrest and murder of Sergei Magnitsky to include Russians guilty of abusing any of their fellow citizens. Despite overwhelming support in Congress, Moscow fought a determined diplomatic and public relations campaign to stop the bill. A small army of lobbyists and public affairs specialists was engaged for that purpose. But the Kremlin’s primary targets of persuasion weren’t on Capitol Hill, they were in the administration, which, to preserve the mostly mythical reset, worked hard behind the scenes to impede the bill’s progress. But it had too much support in both houses of Congress to be stopped.
The administration might not have realized it at the time, but the tens of thousands of Russians who poured into the streets of Moscow and other Russian cities to protest irregularities in Duma elections at the end of 2011 and Putin’s election to a third presidential term in March 2012 would deal the final blow to the dream of partnership with Russia. Putin’s party, United Russia, had won a plurality in the parliamentary elections, but its share of the vote was substantially reduced from the previous election, and witnesses had alleged thousands of election violations. In response to the protests, an incensed Putin launched his harshest crackdown yet on dissenters, the remaining independent media in Russia, and foreign NGOs working there. It was in this wave of repression that the members of the punk rock group Pussy Riot were arrested for “hooliganism.”
Putin blamed the Obama administration for fomenting the protests, especially Secretary of State Clinton, who had appropriately stated the administration had “serious concerns about the conduct of the [December] election.” “The Russian people,” she continued, “deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted.” The new U.S. ambassador, Michael McFaul, who had been one of the architects of the Russian reset, welcomed a number of prominent opposition figures and leading protesters to the embassy, which didn’t endear him to the objects of the protests. Putin had expected a more triumphant return to the Russian presidency. Instead, he heard masses of Russians chant “Putin is a thief.” He was embarrassed and worried. The Arab Spring was under way and protests were rattling autocracies across the Middle East, and overthrowing some of them. I had by this time discovered the dubious pleasures of Twitter, and as I watched on cable TV the marchers in Moscow chant their anti-regime slogans, I tweeted the following, “Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighborhood near you.”
I got more of a reaction from him than I expected. The embattled presidential candidate had already blamed the protests on Secretary Clinton’s statements (and unbeknownst to her and every other American, he would seek revenge five years later by ordering his trolls and hackers and subcontractors at WikiLeaks to help defeat her). When he was asked about my mischievous insult on a televised call-in program a few days later, Putin unleashed quite a tirade. “Mr. McCain fought in Vietnam,” he observed.
I think that he has enough blood of peaceful citizens on his hands. It must be impossible for him to live without these disgusting scenes anymore. . . . He was captured and they kept him not just in prison, but in a pit for several years. Anyone would go crazy.
It wasn’t the first time I had heard that insult, and I laughed it off. Putin normally affects insouciance when he’s trying to offend a foreign critic who’s annoyed him. The barely disguised fury in his response to my insolence told me two things: he doesn’t like me, and he was genuinely worried about his political survival.
I think the campaign of repression Putin orchestrated to strengthen his hold on power effectively ensured the passage of the Magnitsky sanctions. But it took a while for the Obama administration to recognize that or that the Russian reset was another casualty of Putin’s furious insecurity. The administration tried to bottle up the bill in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by my friend John Kerry, who would succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. We went around him. We still had a law on the books, Jackson-Vanik, that imposed restrictions on trade with the former Soviet Union to force it to let Russian Jews immigrate to Israel. The Soviet Union didn’t exist anymore, the refuseniks had long immigrated, and Russia was preparing to enter the World Trade Organization. Jackson-Vanik had to be replaced by permanent normal trade status to allow WTO rules to apply to trade with the United States. Legislation to that effect was pending before the Senate Finance Committee, and I went to see the chairman, Max Baucus of Montana, to tell him that unless our Magnitsky sanctions were added to his trade legislation, I and several other sponsors of the sanctions would oppose it, ensuring its defeat. The threat was enough to convince the administration and John to relent. The Magnitsky sanctions passed the House overwhelmingly in November 2012. The Senate followed the next month. President Obama signed the bill on December 14, and Moscow retaliated by barring all American adoptions of Russian children, a cruel and ineffective response. U.S.-funded NGOs were barred from working in Russia as well. Moscow has continued to complain bitterly about the sanctions and litigate the issue ever since, even, as we recently discovered, seeking the assistance of President Trump’s son during the 2016 campaign. Last year, the Kremlin accused Bill Browder of complicity in Sergei’s murder, and registered a warrant with Interpol for his arrest, which resulted in his visa being denied by the State Department last year. An uproar ensued, and the decision was quickly reversed.
The dissidents who had advised that the sanctions proposed in the Magnitsky legislation would hurt the regime where it most mattered were proved right. In 2016, we passed the Global Magnitsky Act, subjecting human rights violators anywhere in the world to the same sanctions, a memorial that the honest and courageous lawyer for whom the law is named would have appreciated, may he rest in peace.
In 2013, Putin had an op-ed published in the New York Times, warning the U.S. not to intervene in the Syrian war on the side of the Syrians murdered with chemical weapons, or the millions of Syrians killed, injured, and dislocated by the Assad regime. Two years later, Putin would deploy Russian soldiers to Syria to fight on behalf of the murderers. I asked and was allowed to publish a response to Putin in Pravda. I began by addressing the falsehood that I was anti-Russian. “I am pro-Russian,” I claimed. “I’m more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today.
I make that claim because I respect your dignity and your right to self-determination. I believe you should live according to the dictates of your conscience, not your government. I believe that you deserve the opportunity to improve your lives in an economy that is built to last and benefits the many, not just the powerful few. You should be governed by a rule of law that is clear, consistently and impartially enforced and just. I make that claim because I believe the Russian people, no less than Americans, are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Much of the commentary in Washington about my op-ed was focused on the fact that it had been published on an online news site, Pravda.ru, and not in the old Communist Party organ, Pravda. Some analysts believed Russians would be offended by my criticism of the regime, despite the fact that the largest anti-regime protests of the last twenty years had just occurred. They seemed to think that the lies Putin published in the Times were more appealing than the truth I published in Pravda.
Nyet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
Know Thyself
(Defending the West)
IN ALL MY YEARS OF travel, I had never seen anything like it. I had wanted to come to Ukraine for months as events seemed to be leading toward a historic turning point for Ukraine and for Europe. Would Ukraine be a part of Europe or a client state of Russia? Would Europe move closer to
the hopeful post–Cold War vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace or would Putin drag it toward his regressive vision of a Europe divided into rival spheres of influence?
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych had been deposed a decade earlier in the Orange Revolution after a fraudulent election and then returned to power in the 2010 presidential election. Though his election was judged by international observers to have been free and fair, Yanukovych had governed as a strongman. He threw his opponent, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, in jail on trumped-up charges and changed the Ukrainian constitution to strengthen the powers of the presidency. The endemic corruption Ukraine had suffered for decades was even more pervasive. However, Yanukovych by necessity appeared to embrace a European future for Ukraine. He had negotiated a formal association agreement with the European Union as the first step toward eventual EU membership. Ukraine was destitute. Corruption, reckless economic mismanagement, price gouging by Russia for its natural gas, had left it broke, deeply in debt, with its currency devalued, and facing a bleak future. Under the terms of the agreement, Ukraine would institute liberal political and economic reforms in exchange for loans, investment, and access to European markets. Association with the EU was popular with Ukrainians, especially with younger Ukrainians, or at least with much of the 80 percent of the population that is ethnic Ukrainian. Ethnic Russians, under 20 percent of Ukrainians, were less enthusiastic. Yanukovych was ethnic Russian and long seen as tied to the Kremlin, but he appeared determined to go through with the agreement. Moscow had waged an intense pressure campaign to persuade him to turn east and join the nascent customs union Russia was forming as a rival to the EU. Its only other members were Kazakhstan and Belarus, with a combined nominal GDP about the same as EU member Romania’s. Putin viewed Ukraine’s economic and political alliance as indispensable to a reconstituted Russian sphere of influence, and he was prepared to fight for it.