The New Tsar (77 page)

Then, with American air strikes only hours away, Obama abruptly reversed course, saying he would seek authorization from Congress before mounting an attack. The coalition he had hoped to build had failed to materialize, with even close allies like Britain and Germany
refusing to endorse a strike. By the time the leaders of the G20 nations met in Petersburg in September, Obama’s international standing was as uncertain as the “red line” he had drawn against the use of chemical weapons. Putin had been isolated in defense of Assad’s brutal crackdown, but now other leaders joined him in insisting that any intervention require the authorization of the United Nations Security Council, where Putin retained the advantage of Russia’s veto. Even Pope Francis sent a letter to Putin urging the leaders “to lay aside the futile pursuit of a military solution.”
¹⁴

A month after pointedly canceling his plans to meet separately with Putin, Obama now pulled him aside at Constantine Palace during the G20 and the two sat down in armchairs, accompanied only by their translators. There Putin laid out a proposal to force Syria to dispose of its chemical stockpiles under international inspection, and Obama agreed. When the idea became public, what little support there had been for another American-led military intervention evaporated.

Putin, who had been vilified for his heavy hand after his reelection, was now hailed as a hero who had averted a potentially disastrous escalation of war. Even as Obama continued to seek congressional approval for potential military action—in part to keep the pressure on Assad’s government to comply with the inspections—Putin drafted an article that the Kremlin’s American public relations firm, Ketchum, managed to place in
The New York Times
on September 12. In it, he argued that it was the United States that threatened the international order established after the Great Patriotic War. Its interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya had proved “ineffective and pointless.” Russia did not want to protect Assad’s regime so much as international law. Only the United Nations Security Council could authorize the use of force against another country. An American attack against Syria, or anything else, “would constitute an act of aggression,” he argued. He ended by disputing Obama’s claim to “American exceptionalism,” made in a nationally televised address explaining his decision not to bomb Syria after all. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation,” Putin wrote. In fact, he concluded, “We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”
¹⁵
The article—and its lecturing tone, its unmistakable allusion to the Declaration of Independence—infuriated officials in Washington. Many pointed out Russia’s hypocrisy for not having sought authorization for its intervention in Georgia in 2008 and
for continuing to supply weapons that allowed Assad’s military to crush the rebels. Putin’s article also included the unsubstantiated claim that the Syrian rebels had likely used chemical weapons and would use them next on Israel.

Yet Putin’s gambit had offered a straw to a war-weary United States, and Obama, already facing opposition in Congress, clutched it. NTV began one broadcast by claiming that Putin should win the Nobel Prize for averting an American air strike. In Russia’s controlled discourse, that was hardly surprising, but Putin’s stance won plaudits in the United States, too—even if most of them came from conservatives happy to see Obama portrayed as a feckless leader, deftly outmaneuvered on the global stage. A month later
Forbes
magazine ranked Putin the most powerful person in the world, passing Obama for the first time; such rankings are meaningless, but Russia’s media repeated it over and over. “Anyone watching this year’s chess match over Syria and NSA leaks has a clear idea of the shifting individual power dynamics,” the
Forbes
editors wrote.
¹⁶
The American blogger Matt Drudge called Putin “the leader of the free world.”

—

A
n even bigger diplomatic triumph for Putin followed, this time in Ukraine. After years of negotiations that culminated in the fall of 2013, Ukraine had edged closer to an association agreement with the European Union, a treaty that would deepen trade and political ties between the two. Since his election in 2010, Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, had maintained closer relations with Russia, keeping his country in Russia’s orbit. With his popularity fading ahead of the next election in 2015, however, he had revived the possibility of strengthening relations with Europe, something strongly supported by the country’s opposition, and he pushed through political reforms that the Europeans had demanded as a condition of signing the agreement. The Europeans were negotiating similar agreements with Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia in the hopes of allowing them all access to the single market of Europe. For diplomats in Europe’s capitals, the integration of these economies, with the prospect of full membership in the future, would steadily expand the peaceful, secure European space, an old idea that had become an article of faith in the twenty-first century.

For Putin, however, the expansion of “Europe” to include Ukraine amounted to an encroachment on Russia that would, in his mind, inevitably be followed by the further encroachment of NATO. Russia’s own
relations with the bloc had stalled, hampered by the suspicions of many European states, especially those once in the Soviet sphere, over energy policies and human rights; a summit in Yekaterinburg in May had failed to secure an agreement allowing visa-free travel for Russian government officials amid a debate over whether the American “Magnitsky sanctions” should be adopted on the continent. Putin’s own efforts to knit Ukraine more closely to Russia, which he had first proposed to Leonid Kuchma on the eve of the Orange Revolution in 2004, had made little progress, blocked by the internal political divisions in Ukraine. Ten years later, Putin’s vision of a trade and economic bloc with Moscow as its core had evolved beyond the technical customs agreements negotiated with Belarus and Kazakhstan. One of the first policy declarations he made in 2011 after announcing his return to the Kremlin was the establishment of a broader pact to reunify the economies that had drifted listlessly apart after the Soviet collapse. He called it the Eurasian Economic Union. Excluding the three Baltic nations, now ensconced in the EU and NATO, Putin envisioned the bloc not merely as a counterbalance to the European Union, but rather as a new empire unto itself, one that bridged European Russia and the vast steppe that stretched from the Black Sea to Central Asia and Siberia.

The Eurasian Union was the manifestation of an ideology that had taken hold among Putin and his inner circle, an ideology that had been missing from the pragmatism that had characterized Putin’s rule until then. Eurasianism in Russia was a deeply conservative philosophy driven underground (or abroad) by the internationalist ideology of the Soviet Union. It had reemerged in the 1990s, blending the religious and monarchical ideas of exiles like Ivan Ilyin, the philosopher Putin took to quoting, with the geopolitical theories of those like Halford Mackinder, whose “Heartland Theory” made Eurasia the “pivot area” in the battle for control of the “World-Island,” the European, Asian, and African landmass. These ideas, championed in articles and books by conservative strategists like Aleksandr Dugin, spread from the fringes of academic debate and became ever more prominent. They circulated among Putin’s closest intimates and were discussed in their late-night meetings; increasingly they peppered the public remarks not only of Putin, but of his more powerful advisers.

The geopolitics coincided with the emerging conservatism in domestic politics that championed—and protected—the values of the Orthodox Church, as well as Islam, and resulted in new laws that made
blasphemy a crime and that banned the dissemination of “homosexual propaganda” to children. Vladimir Yakunin, another Putin confidant, viewed efforts to impose the cultural values of the West as a new front in a historic geopolitical struggle between sea and land powers, with Russia (a vast land power) defending its very existence against the United States (the new sea power), much like Mackinder theorized. He described the American dominance of geopolitics and world finance as a conspiracy to suppress any potential competitors, which is what made the Eurasian Union, he believed, so threatening to the West. “Russia was, is, and will be some kind of geopolitical competitor to the interests of Anglo-Saxon civilization,” he said.
¹⁷
The irony of the new ideology was that Russia’s elite, especially those who could afford it, had become thoroughly westernized, taking vacations and owning properties in the nations whose values they reviled. Even Yakunin’s son lived in London, prompting a satirical blog from Aleksei Navalny. “Down the voracious throat of the odious West, which is devoid of spiritual values, Vladimir Ivanovich Yakunin threw his dearest possession—excluding his love for Vladimir Putin—his family.”
¹⁸

In September, fresh from the diplomatic triumph over Syria’s chemical weapons, Putin described the “Euro-Atlantic countries” as dangerously adrift from their Christian roots. “They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan. The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote pedophilia.” Worse, he said, these nations wanted to export these dangerous ideas. It was “a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.”

Of all the countries Putin hoped to unite in the Eurasian Union, none was as important as Ukraine, with its deep historical, social, and religious ties to Russia. Many Ukrainians were ethnic Russians, sundered in Putin’s view from their homeland by the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century. And now Ukraine was turning toward the embrace of the European Union, encouraged by the Europeans and the Americans, at the expense of his Eurasian Union. It was evidence enough for Putin when Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in December 2012 that the Eurasian Union was merely an attempt to subjugate its
neighbors in a new Soviet-like alliance—and “we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”
¹⁹

The European Union set a deadline for Ukraine to adopt the trade agreement before its summit in Lithuania in November, and in the months leading up to it Putin exerted enormous effort to persuade Ukraine to resist. As he had before the Orange Revolution in 2004, he visited repeatedly. In July 2013, to highlight the religious ties that bound Ukraine to Russia, he attended a ceremony in Kyiv to commemorate the anniversary of the baptism of Prince Vladimir in 988. “We are all spiritual heirs of what happened here 1,025 years ago,” Putin said, appearing with Yanukovych at the Monastery of the Caves, one of the holiest sites of Orthodoxy. He used economic levers, too. Within weeks of the anniversary, Russia banned the import of Ukrainian railcars and candies manufactured by Roshen, a confectionary owned by an oligarch and former minister, Petro Poroshenko, who favored closer integration with Europe. In August, Russia virtually halted all commercial traffic across its border with Ukraine by overzealously enforcing the customs rules of Russia’s union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. It was a very public way of making the point that Ukraine’s economic future would be much easier if it joined Russia’s union, not Europe’s. Putin’s special envoy on Ukraine, the former presidential “challenger” Sergei Glazyev, traveled to Yalta in September and warned at a conference that Ukraine’s embrace of Europe would amount to suicide. “Signing this treaty,” he said, ominously, “will lead to political and social unrest.”
²⁰
He later provided Yanukovych with a Russian translation of the thousand pages of the European Union’s agreement (which, evidently, the Ukrainians had not translated) and warned him that adopting it would mean that Russia would have to close its borders to avoid an influx of European goods.

Putin was said to dislike Yanukovych, a physically imposing but unprincipled leader who he felt was betraying him by flirting with the Europeans. Putin met him in late October and again in early November, icily explaining that an agreement with the European Union would cost Ukraine dearly. The losses it was already feeling because of the customs enforcement would pale in comparison to the billions of dollars in economic pain that the country would suffer from the new barriers to the Russian market and higher prices for natural gas.

After the last of those meetings, Yanukovych’s negotiating partners in Europe noticed a change in his demeanor. They suspected Putin
had threatened something more than economic pain, presenting him with
kompromat
that he would not want made public. Yanukovych’s venality—the insider deals that enriched him, his family, and his close business associates—certainly made him vulnerable. It was not blackmail, a senior Kremlin adviser insisted later, but a sober analysis of how deeply intertwined the economies of the two countries were. In his meetings with the Europeans, Yanukovych now insisted that Ukraine stood to lose $160 billion in trade with Russia and higher energy prices, an improbable figure nearly equal to the country’s gross domestic product.
²¹
It was a last, desperate ploy by Yanukovych to persuade the Europeans to sweeten their offer, but the Europeans balked. Putin had triumphed.

On November 21, a week before the summit in Lithuania, Yanukovych’s government stunned his European counterparts, and many in Ukraine, by announcing that his country would back out of the agreement, a reversal that upended months of intensive talks. Yanukovych’s announcement provoked outrage among those Ukrainians who envisioned closer ties with Europe as an inevitable evolution from their country’s Soviet past. That night one thousand protesters rallied in Kyiv’s main plaza, Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Yulia Tymoshenko issued a jailhouse statement urging people to react “as they would to a coup d’état” and take to the streets. The next day a few thousand more did.
²²
By the weekend, the crowds had swelled, and tents were erected, as they had been after the fraudulent election in 2004—only this time the flags that fluttered in the streets were not orange, but blue with a circle of yellow stars, the banner of the European Union. They called their protest “EuroMaidan,” and it reflected the clash of ideals among the country’s 46 million people. The protesters soon turned their fury on the statue of Lenin that still stood at the end of Kyiv’s main avenue. Lenin was not simply an anachronism; he was a manifestation of the lingering dominance of Moscow.