The New Tsar (80 page)

Ever since his return in 2012, Putin had narrowed the funnel of information that reached him to exclude the diplomats, economic ministers, or others who might have offered advice on the possible consequences of what was unfolding. Putin’s actions now left his spokesman and even his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, repeating falsehoods, denying there were any Russians in Crimea, even as they seized its strategic sites, one by one. When the United Nations Security Council met in emergency session in New York on February 27, the day after the “little green men” appeared, Russia’s ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, was unprepared to explain even the basic facts of what was happening, because, it seemed, he clearly did not know them. That same day, Yanukovych finally resurfaced in Russia, a week after fleeing Kyiv. He held a surreal press conference at a shopping center in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, not far from the Ukrainian border, where he claimed he remained the legitimate president of Ukraine, even as protesters and journalists were combing through his presidential estate outside of Kyiv, rifling through evidence of his personal extravagance and professional corruption. Yanukovych said he supported the territorial integrity of the country and opposed any military intervention by Russia; he too was unaware that Putin had already launched one.

The day after Yanukovych surfaced, Putin submitted a proposal to the Federation Council to authorize the use of military force in Ukraine. The council’s speaker, Valentina Matviyenko, who had only three days earlier ruled out any intervention, promptly convened a rare Saturday session that with remarkable alacrity approved Putin’s request. After a vitriolic “debate” in which speaker after speaker railed against the evil of Ukraine and the United States, the 90 (of 166) members who were present voted unanimously to give Putin free rein to invade its neighbor—
after he already had. It was only after that, on March 2, that Putin summoned Yanukovych to his residence outside Moscow and forced him to draft and sign a letter, dated the day before—that is, before the Federation Council’s authorization vote—asking Russia to intervene. “Ukraine is on the brink of a civil war. In the country there is chaos and anarchy,” the letter said, blending indisputable fact with the paranoia that infused Putin’s closest circle of advisers. “Under the influence of Western countries there are open acts of terror and violence. People are being persecuted for language and political reasons. So in this regard I would call on the president of Russia, Mr. Putin, asking him to use the armed forces of the Russian Federation to establish legitimacy, peace, law and order, stability and defend the people of Ukraine.”
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T
he day he pressed Yanukovych to sign the letter, Putin held a series of telephone calls with world leaders who strained to understand what exactly was unfolding. The most crucial was the one with Angela Merkel. Only two days before, he had told her that there were no Russian troops in Crimea, but now he acknowledged that there were—something no Russian official would admit publicly until Putin did in April, six weeks after the fact.
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Putin repeated his warnings that ethnic Russians faced violence in Ukraine, forcing him to act. Merkel, the leader who remained Putin’s best interlocutor on the continent, now turned sharply against him. She telephoned Barack Obama even as he was on the phone with Putin afterward, and when they spoke, she dropped her cautious approach to the crisis and took a far harsher stance. The United States, soon followed by the European Union and other members of the G8, warned that Russia risked its international standing and withering sanctions if it pressed a territorial claim on Crimea.

Putin’s strategy at this point unfolded haphazardly, catching even his underlings off guard. He was making decisions alone and off the cuff. After conspicuously attending the snap military exercises at the Kirillovsky range north of Moscow, Putin returned to Moscow on March 4 and for the first time spoke publicly about the crisis that had gripped Ukraine—and the world—for the previous two weeks. He met with a small group of journalists from the Kremlin pool at Novo-Ogaryovo. Unlike his carefully orchestrated yearly press conferences, this one was hastily organized, and even he seemed ill-prepared. His answers were confused and, at times, contradictory. He appeared uncomfortable, alternately slouching and squirming in his seat. He declared Yanukovych
the only legitimate president of Ukraine, but said there was no legitimate leader in Ukraine that he could talk to. (“I think he has no political future,” he added regarding Yanukovych, condescendingly, “and I have told him so.”) A change in power in Ukraine was “probably necessary,” but what happened in Kyiv was an “armed seizure of power” that had, “like the genie suddenly let out of the bottle,” flooded the capital with nationalists, swastika-wearing “semi-fascists,” and anti-Semites—and yet, he added, “We have no enemies in Ukraine.”

And again he raised the question of America’s wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq and Libya, which were inextricably involved in this crisis only in his mind. Obama had, in fact, reacted slowly to the events in Ukraine, distracted by the crises in the Middle East, but Putin was convinced that the Americans, even more than the Europeans, had instigated the upheaval. “I sometimes get the feeling that somewhere across that huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing.” He obliquely acknowledged that Russia had reinforced its troops at the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, but when pressed on the soldiers in Russian uniforms, though without insignia, who were occupying key buildings he dissembled, calling them “local self-defense units.” “You can go to a store and buy any kind of uniform,” he said.

Putin expressed support for the right of people in Crimea to hold a referendum but emphasized that he was not considering the possibility of Crimea joining Russia. And yet two days later, with international opposition growing, Crimea’s new parliament abruptly announced that it had accelerated its plans and would hold the referendum on the peninsula’s fate in a mere ten days, on March 16. Despite the opposition of ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, once horribly repressed under Stalin and free to return openly only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the results of the referendum were now merely a formality. The following day, despite Putin’s own disavowal only days before, the Kremlin made it clear that Crimea was returning to the Motherland, as leaders of the Duma and the Federation met with a delegation from Crimea, while an officially sanctioned mass rally was held in Red Square, which swayed with Russian flags and banners. “Crimea is Russian Land,” many signs said. The slogans, like the new mission of Vladimir Putin, was soon condensed into an incantation that simultaneously conveyed both pride and pique, Putin’s rebuttal to what he considered years of mounting disrespect
for Russia. It would become a rallying cry with surprisingly deep resonance, though one that Putin, forced by an unexpected sequence of events, did not anticipate would define his legacy and Russia’s for years to come:
Krim nash! Crimea is ours!

And on March 18, two days after a referendum that was held under the barrels of Russian rifles and widely denounced as a farce, it was. Putin appeared in the Grand Kremlin Palace before the country’s political elite—to a one, publicly at least, fully behind him—and declared Crimea and, separately, Sevastopol to be new constituent parts of the Russian Federation. “Everything in Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride,” he told them, invoking the legendary place where Prince Vladimir was baptized, thus begetting Rus itself, and the battles, from Balaklava to Sevastopol, that symbolize “Russian military glory and outstanding valor.” The audience applauded and cheered, interrupting his speech repeatedly. Some had tears in their eyes. Putin appeared later that evening at a rally and concert in Red Square, organized as a national celebration that would become a hallowed holiday. “After a long, hard and exhaustive journey at sea, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to the native shores, to the home port, to Russia!” he told the pulsating crowd. Among the songs played that night was a sentimental Soviet song called “Sevastopol Waltz.” It had been written after the Great Patriotic War in 1953, a year after Putin was born. Most Russians of a certain age and temperament could sing along.

We returned home

On the edge of the Soviet land

Again, as before, the chestnuts are in bloom

And again, I was waiting for you…

Along the boulevards we will walk

And, as in youth, we will sing
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T
he last nation to annex the territory of another was Iraq in 1990, when the armies of Saddam Hussein swept through Kuwait. Iraq’s invasion, occupation, and annexation prompted universal condemnation and ultimately the formation of an American-led military coalition that, under the auspices of the United Nations and with no objection from the Soviet Union, expelled the Iraqis a mere seven months later. Putin understood that; he knew the risks he took by seizing foreign territory. Even in 2008, when Russia thrust into Georgia, South Ossetia
and Abkhazia were disputed territories policed by Russian peacekeepers and under attack by the Georgian military. Crimea was indisputably part of Ukraine, however, and faced no military or security threat. Putin, in a matter of days, had not only violated the sovereignty of a neighboring nation, he upended what many had presumed to be the immutable post–Cold War order that had taken root after the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, one which many in Europe hoped would usher in an era of peaceful cooperation and integration after the bloodshed of the twentieth century. Putin himself had repeatedly advocated as much, denouncing the unilateral use of force by the United States and its allies as a threat to an international system that protected the rights of sovereign nations from attack. He had made this exact argument only months before when Barack Obama debated a military strike against Syria for its use of chemical weapons.

Putin understood what the reaction would be to the annexation, but he also calculated that the world would not dare to act as it had against Saddam Hussein in 1990. Iraq had been a weak nation, but Russia was a resurgent superpower. The West would not act against Russia—certainly not on behalf of Ukraine—just as it had not acted in 2008 to preserve Georgia’s territorial integrity. Russia was no longer an enervated Soviet Union in its twilight, and Putin was now prepared to act in what he, and he alone, considered the country’s national interest. He seized Crimea from Ukraine because he could—because he believed that a superpower had the legal and moral authority to do so, just as the United States had been doing ever since the end of the Cold War.

The operation Putin ordered in Crimea reflected the lessons the military had learned from the war in Georgia, as well as the benefits of the military modernization he had overseen since he was prime minister. Russia’s military budget had nearly doubled since 2005, reaching an estimated $84 billion in 2014. It lagged behind only the United States and China but spent more as a percentage of its gross domestic product than any major economy.
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The effects of the modernization were manifested in new weaponry, including ships and fighter jets that increasingly challenged American and NATO’s air defenses, but also in the training and equipping of its most elite forces, like those ordered into Ukraine. The seizure of Crimea demonstrated a more capable—and to other neighbors in Europe, a more ominous—military machine than any since the Red Army disintegrated. It blended hard power with soft power, speed and stealth, obfuscation and relentless propaganda meant to deflect
culpability until it was too late to do anything about it. By the time Putin acknowledged that Russian forces had in fact taken control of the entire peninsula before the referendum on its status, the annexation was already a fait accompli. And despite the international opprobrium, it would not soon be reversed.

Putin scrambled to justify the annexation, and his shifting arguments echoed throughout the diplomatic and military establishments and thus in the media the Kremlin controlled. He argued that Crimea had once been part of the historic Russian empire, that it had been administered in Soviet times from Moscow until Nikita Khrushchev bequeathed it to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic in 1954, that it remained home of the new Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, that the new government in Ukraine was illegitimate, that the people of Crimea voted for independence from Ukraine, that they faced imminent danger from marauding fascists. Sometimes he simply asserted a moral equivalency that the United States had invaded other countries so why could not Russia? The most ominous rationale for many was that he had intervened to protect his Russian “compatriots” in Crimea—that is, not citizens of Russia, but those Russians who, as he often pointed out, found themselves adrift in “foreign countries” when the Soviet Union splintered in 1991 into separate successor nations. For years he had extolled the
Russki mir
, or Russian world, the community united across borders by language, culture, and faith, but never before had he used the notion as a rationale for military action. It was an argument that had uncomfortable parallels to those Adolf Hitler used in 1938 to claim Austria and later the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia for the
Volksgenossen
. The question now was where would Putin’s policy stop? Other parts of Ukraine included significant populations of ethnic Russians, as did Kazakhstan and the three former Soviet republics now in NATO and protected by a mutual defense pledge contained in Article 5 of the alliance’s charter: Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Few thought that Putin would risk a military confrontation with NATO by attacking one of its member states, but no one seemed certain that Putin’s calculations were entirely rational anymore.