Window Seat on the World Page 25

  An embarrassed Clinton recovered by saying, “We won’t let you do that to us, I promise.”327

  Lavrov never let her live it down, continuing to bring it up during our later meetings with the Russians.

  President Putin also disliked Secretary Clinton because he believed she’d meddled in Russian affairs by labeling the 2011 parliamentary elections in his country “neither fair nor free.”328

  He continued to stoke anti-American sentiment for his own benefit while seeking reelection in 2012, and relations took a nosedive at the end of that year when Congress passed and President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act.

  It was written to sanction Russian human rights abusers by punishing those responsible for the death of tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky. He was fatally beaten in 2009 while being held in a Moscow prison after investigating fraud by Russian tax officials.329 The law named in his honor requires that the State Department annually update the list of those being sanctioned under the Act.

  The Russian Duma responded by voting 400–4 in December 2012 to ban US adoptions of Russian children.330

  Against that backdrop, Kerry tried his own reset with the Russians after becoming secretary of State in February 2013. He met in Berlin with Lavrov during his first trip abroad. He then traveled to Moscow in May 2013 to solicit President Putin’s views on world events, especially ending the civil war in Syria.

  The secretary showed due deference to our World War II ally by placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the edge of Red Square. Then he waited patiently at his hotel for their appointed meeting hour. It passed with no call from the Kremlin. Even after being summoned to the gilded seat of the Russian Federation, Kerry was forced to sit again in a waiting room until President Putin was ready to receive him.

  In all, the Russian president kept the US secretary of State on hold for three hours. This was one of his common moves to put his opponents off balance.331

  Kerry regained fresh hope for the relationship after his work with Lavrov on the Syria chemical weapons agreement. He presented his counterpart with a box of oversized potatoes from Idaho—where the secretary has a ski home—when the two met in Paris just four months later.

  The foreign minister’s spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, had her own gift for her State Department counterpart, spokesperson Jen Psaki: a pink “Ushanka.” The fur hat with ear flaps sported a red Russian star on its brow. Kerry and Lavrov smiled during a group photo with their two aides.

  The showdown in Ukraine overtook those goodwill gestures, however.

  The Russians felt throughout 2013 that the Americans were interfering with Ukraine’s affairs by encouraging President Yanukovych and, later, his opponents in their westward tilt.

  Those accusations gained currency in early February 2014, just before the crackdown in Independence Square, when an audio recording was posted on YouTube. It appeared to reveal Assistant Secretary Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, talking about plans for a replacement government in Kiev.

  “I don’t think Klitsch [Vitaly Klitschko, one of three main opposition leaders] should go into the government,” said a voice sounding like Nuland’s. “I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”332

  A voice sounding like Pyatt’s replied, “Just let him stay out and do his political homework and stuff.”

  The voice purported to be Nuland’s says, “I think Yats [opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk] is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.”333

  That voice later expresses exasperation with the European Union, which had been more reluctant than the United States to provoke Russia over Ukraine.

  “You know, fuck the EU,” says the voice attributed to Nuland.334

  The blunt talk went off like a bomb within the refined salons of diplomacy.

  And there was little doubt what leader stood to benefit from its disclosure, or which country possessed the means to bug a cellphone conversation between top US diplomats.

  While Nuland made amends to her European counterparts, President Obama spoke out against the crackdown on Ukrainian protestors.

  Secretary Kerry monitored developments in Ukraine and even visited Kiev and the Maidan in March 2014 at Nuland’s urging. Nonetheless, his primary focus at the time was fostering a Middle East peace process.

  For one brief shining moment, roughly the third week of February 2014, Assistant Secretary Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt reveled in the ouster of President Yanukovych and the installation of a caretaker government headed by Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

  Soon, though, they were rendered powerless when President Putin unleashed a vigorous response to what he had branded a “coup d’état.”335

  _________

  CRIMEA HAS RUSSIAN ROOTS stretching back to 1783, when the Black Sea peninsula became part of the Russian Empire.336

  The province of Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954, and it remained part of Ukraine when it gained its independence in 1991 during the breakup of the Soviet Union.337

  Nonetheless, Crimea maintained strong ties to Russia. It has an ethnic Russian majority and many of its residents continue to speak Russian. Russia itself has a major interest in Crimea because its city of Sevastopol is headquarters for the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet.

  The warm water port lets Russia project power not only around the Black Sea but also into the Mediterranean and surrounding countries such as Syria. Russia used its base in Sevastopol to ferry troops and conduct a naval blockade against Georgia during its 2008 invasion.338

  Russia also has combat aircraft stationed at Crimea’s Kacha and Gvardeisk air bases, which help defend its southern flank.339

  While Russia had a lease in Sevastopol extending to 2042, President Putin didn’t want to risk losing access to the Crimean peninsula after President Yanukovych was ousted. He later acknowledged convening an all-night meeting with his security forces to discuss extricating the deposed president after he had disappeared from public view.

  When the meeting finished on the morning of February 24, 2014, according to a subsequent documentary that included an interview with President Putin, “I said to my colleagues: ‘We must start working on returning Crimea to Russia.’”340

  The comment affirmed a criticism leveled by former Secretary Clinton, who had traveled to perhaps Crimea’s most famous city—Yalta—after leaving office, to support Ukraine. She said President Putin was trying to “re-Sovietize” parts of the former Soviet Union, a complaint that angered him despite its subsequent validity.341

  Pro-Russian demonstrations had already broken out in Sevastopol, and they continued on February 24, 2014. The next day, Sevastopol illegally elected a Russian citizen as its mayor.

  Two days later, an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 Crimean Tatars—Turkish ethnic residents—and other supporters of the Euromaidan movement faced off against 600 to 700 supporters of pro-Russian organizations and the Russian Unity Party near the Supreme Council of Crimea building.342 Thousands also clashed during opposing rallies in Simferopol, a city that would emerge as the de facto capital of Crimea.343

  The battling effectively came to an end the following day when Russian Special Forces invaded sovereign Ukrainian territory and seized control of the buildings housing the Supreme Council of Crimea and the Council of Ministers in Simferopol.

  They raised a Russian flag over each.344

  Additional Russian forces, aided by Ukrainian special forces formerly loyal to President Yanukovych, established checkpoints on the Isthmus of Perekop and the Chonhar Peninsula, which separate the Crimea peninsula from the Ukrainian mainland.345

  The actions collectively isolated Crimea from Ukraine and put Russia in control of the province for the first time since 1954.

  Not only had Russia invaded a sovereign country and laid claim to noncontiguous territory, but it had violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security
Assurances.

  Under that agreement, Ukraine had surrendered control of its nuclear weapons—at the time the third largest arsenal in the world—in exchange for assurance from the Russian Federation, the United States, and the United Kingdom that the three nuclear powers would “respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine.”346

  The three also affirmed their obligation “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”347

  Not that President Putin immediately conceded his involvement in Crimea or violation of the Memorandum.

  In a shameless bit of denial, the Russians not only refused to admit their forces had seized Crimea but they spun stories about how Crimea was being defended by pro-Russian nationalists. They said average citizens had spontaneously sprung to arms to protect themselves against “terrorists.”

  They said so even though troops at key strategic points across Crimea all spoke Russian and wore green Russian military uniforms, minus the insignia of the Russian Federation.

  The so-called little green men also used helmets and other equipment only issued to Russian Special Forces, including the new 7.62 mm PKP machine gun.348

  Addressing that, President Putin suggested Crimeans had seized the uniforms from Ukrainian military depots they looted. He also told reporters in early March 2014 that “local forces of self-defense” had seized the buildings.349

  He said residents in Crimea had the right of self-determination against terrorists and extremists, and any aid to them amounted to humanitarian assistance.

  Secretary Kerry expressed disbelief at President Putin’s denials when he arrived in Kiev that same day.

  “He really denied there were troops in Crimea?” Kerry said.350

  President Obama also didn’t buy the explanation.

  “There have been reports that Putin is pausing and reflecting on what’s happened,” he said on March 4, 2014. “There is a strong belief that Russian action is violating international law. Putin seems to have a different set of lawyers, but I don’t think that is fooling anyone.”351

  The remark harked back to that New York Times op-ed, written by President Putin, that Lavrov had so eagerly thrown in Kerry’s face during their news conference after the chemical weapons agreement.

  That deal in Geneva had been struck to head off US military intervention in Syria, which Putin said would violate international law. President Putin went on to intervene militarily in Ukraine, even invading Crimea, but he ignored his prior admonition to the United States:

  We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.352

  When President Putin was called out for violating the Budapest Memorandum, he told reporters it wasn’t operative because Ukraine had gone through a change of leadership.353 He also took it a step further, accusing the United States itself of violating the Memorandum by fomenting the Euromaidan movement.354

  His foreign minister was even more strident in February 2016. Sergey Lavrov said the Memorandum only contained one obligation: “Not to attack Ukraine with nukes.”355 He simply ignored the first of the six obligations spelled out by the document, as well as the four that followed the one he referenced.

  That prompted Steven Pifer, a former Foreign Service officer who helped negotiate the Budapest Memorandum, to write in Canada’s National Post: “What does it say about the mendacity of Russian diplomacy and its contempt for international opinion when the foreign minister says something that can be proven wrong with less than 30 seconds of Google fact-checking?”356

  The Russians never flinched in the face of such duplicity. As Pifer hinted, this practice was something that would wilt in a country with a free press like the United States. That underscored a major challenge for the Obama administration in dealing with the Russian government.

  While the United States spent time in February and March 2014 offering $1 billion in loan guarantees to the new government in Ukraine and joining with the European Union in levying sanctions against Russia and its elite, the actions did little to deter it.

  Russia supported a March 16 referendum in Crimea the rest of the world deemed illegal. When a reported 96 percent voted in favor of leaving Ukraine and joining Russia, the pretext for President Putin’s annexation of Crimea was complete.

  And not only did Russia seize control of Crimea, but it massed forty thousand troops along Ukraine’s eastern border under the guise of holding military exercises in Russian territory. When fighting broke out in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in April 2014, the Russians denied their troops were involved despite the presence of little green men on a new front.

  Russian military leaders would go on to tell families back home that soldiers who died in the fighting had been killed in military exercises—if they offered any explanation at all when their coffins returned to Russia.357

  Such acts, while being criticized by some families in Russia, would never be tolerated in the United States, especially in the post-Vietnam era. It was another measure of the difficulty in dealing with the Russian government.

  It was not the last one, though.

  President Putin and Russian officials similarly stonewalled after a Malaysia Airlines civilian jet was shot down on July 17, 2014, by an antiaircraft missile fired over eastern Ukraine.

  All 283 passengers and 15 crew members aboard the Boeing 777, which was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, were killed.

  Dutch investigators later determined the plane was downed by an advanced Russian Buk surface-to-air missile launched from a pro-Russian area of eastern Ukraine.358 Meanwhile, the new government in Kiev released video the day after the crash showing a mobile Buk launcher—with two of its four missiles gone—as it was being driven from eastern Ukraine toward the Russian border immediately after the crash.359

  Radio transmissions also appeared to show separatist forces saying they had accidentally downed a civilian airliner.360

  The Russians follow a well-worn playbook in such circumstances.

  First, they stonewall by saying they can’t comment until they receive “information” about an event. Then, when confronted with evidence, they demand to examine it and know how it was gathered. US officials don’t see this as a means to ensure due process but a way to glean insight into intelligence methods so they can avoid the same mistake twice.

  In the case of the Malaysia Airlines jet, the Russian government dismissed the voluminous and detailed Dutch evidence. The Russians suggested the plane had been shot down by a Ukrainian military jet; by a Ukrainian missile battery; or by pro-Russian separatists who’d seized control of a Ukrainian missile battery—not one of their own.361

  Ultimately, the Russians refused to accept responsibility for any facet of the crash despite proof the aircraft had been downed by a missile fired by one of its systems temporarily staged in a rebel-held area of eastern Ukraine.

  In the best-case scenario based on the facts, not rhetoric, it had been as if they gave a drunk a loaded gun and then disavowed any responsibility when he fired it.

  This shirking of responsibility contrasted with the public accounting and humiliation the United States faced in 1988 after the USS Vincennes, one of the Navy’s most advanced guided missile cruisers, accidentally shot down an Iranian commercial jet over the Persian Gulf.

  The United States publicly acknowledged its mistake and paid a $132 million settlement, something the Russian government never felt any responsibility to do after the Malaysia Airlines crash.362

  The challenge that repeatedly cropped up for President Obam
a and Secretary Kerry was being publicly accountable for decisions and their consequences while dealing with a country and leaders who faced no such accountability.

  (Top) A bread-and-salt greeting at hotel. (Middle) Honoring Russians at their Kremlin Tomb. (Bottom) A photo with the press secretaries.

  (Top) A potato gift amid efforts to build bridges. (Bottom) The two counterparts in Geneva.

  (Top) Addressing reporters in the Kremlin. (Middle) A walk in Moscow. (Bottom) Assistant Secretary Nuland at a meeting with President Putin.

  (Top) President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov betray no reaction as Secretary Kerry addresses them. (Bottom) Red Square and the Kremlin under a full moon.

  This point was underscored during one visit to Moscow when we drove past the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, which crosses the Moscow River just outside the Kremlin Wall. It was on that bridge in February 2015 that one of President Putin’s most prominent critics, former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, was shot four times in the back and killed. He was assassinated just two days before participating in a rally against Russia’s financial crisis and its involvement in the eastern Ukraine fighting.363

  President Putin denied any involvement and pledged to Nemtsov’s mother—who previously said she feared he would kill her son—that he would ensure “the organizers and perpetrators of a vile and cynical murder get the punishment they deserve.”364

  Five Chechen contract killers were later convicted in the murder and sentenced to jail, but their alleged leader was not captured.365

  One thing President Putin later did admit in regard to Ukraine was that those little green men in Crimea had been Russian soldiers, after all. During his annual televised meeting with the nation on April 17, 2014, he said the soldiers’ presence was necessary so Crimeans could vote freely in the referendum about their future.