The New Tsar (82 page)

On the afternoon of July 17, the website used by Igor Strelkov posted a note announcing the downing of yet another AN-26, this one near the village of Torez, located between Donetsk and the Russian border. “We warned them—don’t fly ‘in our sky,’ ” the statement, attributed to Strelkov, declared triumphantly.
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The Ukrainians later claimed to have intercepted telephone calls between a fighter and a Russian intelligence officer confirming the downing. It was not a Ukrainian military jet, though. The wreckage that fell from the sky belonged to a Boeing 777, carrying 283 passengers and 15 crew members on Malaysia Airways Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Their bodies landed amid the debris over several square miles of farmland, sown with wheat.

By all accounts except that of the Russians, a surface-to-air missile from a mobile battery known as a 9K37 Buk struck the airliner as it flew over the Donetsk region. Witnesses, including reporters from the Associated Press, reported seeing the battery moving through the villages nearby, while subsequent reports traced the unit to the Russian military, specifically the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade based in the city of Kursk. The unit was said to have crossed the border from Russia the night before and returned again, carrying only three of its four missiles. A preliminary investigation by the government of the Netherlands also concluded that the airline exploded in midair, the damage to its fuselage consistent with the explosion of a missile like the Buk, not a missile fired from a fighter jet, as Russia’s Ministry of Defense quickly asserted.
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Putin, who was returning from his trip to Brazil when the tragedy occurred, spoke by telephone with Merkel and Obama that day, but made only terse statements in public. He said nothing about the evident source of the missile—neither to confirm nor deny Russian involvement—but blamed the tragedy on the resumption of fighting in eastern Ukraine, suggesting that it was the fault of the government of
Ukraine for trying to regain territory being held by armed insurgents. “No one should, and no one has the right, to use this tragedy to pursue his own political goals,” he said in an unusual television address, delivered in the wee hours of the morning on July 21. He looked tired and drawn, standing shakily at his office desk, his eyes reddened. “Rather than dividing us, tragedies of this sort should bring people together. All those who are responsible for the situation in the region must take greater responsibility before their own peoples and before the peoples of the countries whose citizens were killed in this disaster.” And yet he took no responsibility upon himself for any role in the tragedy, or in an increasingly deadly conflict that would kill thousands and drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes on a continent that had dreamed of putting its bloody history behind it.

The world—at least much of the West—turned definitively against Putin after Flight 17. “Putin’s missile,” the British tabloid
The Sun
declared, and even more sober news organizations drew an inexorable line of responsibility. Without Putin, there would have been no annexation of Crimea, no war in eastern Ukraine, no wreckage scattered across the wheat fields. This was Putin’s war, and the best efforts of the Kremlin’s propagandists to muddy the waters—by broadcasting false claims and conspiracy theories—did nothing to obviate the blame. Even if he did not understand it, others around him did. He could have reined in the rebel leaders, withdrawn the Russian forces and equipment, facilitated the international investigation into the downing, and found and turned over to justice those responsible for the murder of 298 people. And yet he could no more do that than he could acknowledge the other failings of his presidency, the other sensational crimes, the corruption that erected the system of loyalty that he had created. Putin had made himself the symbol of the resurgent Russia, and the idea had to be maintained without acknowledgment of fault. Only in a cult of power can the leader be inseparable from the state. “There is Putin, and there is Russia,” the man who had replaced Vladislav Surkov in 2011 as the Kremlin’s political strategist, Vyacheslav Volodin, said in 2014. “No Putin—no Russia.”
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T
he rift between Russia and the West now seemed irrevocable, and it was deliberate. The United States had already expanded its sanctions the day before the downing of Flight 17, and in the wake of the accident, opposition in Europe to intensifying its sanctions evaporated as well.
Entire sectors of the economy, including banking and energy, now faced sanctions, not just the officials and friends close to Putin. By the middle of 2014, capital flight had reached $75 billion for the year as those with cash sought safe harbors offshore; by the end of the year, $150 billion had fled the country. The economy, already slowing, slumped badly as investments withered. The value of the ruble crashed, despite efforts by the Central Bank to shore it up. The price of oil slumped—which Putin blamed on a conspiracy between the United States and Saudi Arabia—and that strained the budget, depleting the reserves that Putin had steadfastly built up throughout his years in power. Russia plunged into an economic crisis as bad as the ones in 1998 and 2009. Putin’s tactics had backfired. Many in the West cheered, seeing the economic crisis as evidence of the self-inflicted pain of Putin’s actions, but the isolation also fed Putin’s view that the crises confronting Russia economically and diplomatically were part of a vast conspiracy effort to weaken Russia—to weaken his rule.

The day after the downing of Flight 17, the international arbitration court in the Hague finally issued its verdicts in the cases brought by the shareholders of Yukos over the expropriation of the company, ordering Russia to pay more than $50 billion in damages, citing Putin’s own defense of the auction of the company’s crown jewel a decade before as evidence of government collusion.
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Each step against Russia he now believed to be a cynical, calculated attack against him. His actions belied a deep sense of grievance and betrayal, sharpened by the crisis that unfolded at the very moment Russia had achieved his Olympic dream. He was impervious to the threats of sanctions or international isolation because he now believed Russia’s views, its interests, would never be respected, as he felt he had never been shown adequate respect, all the more so since he returned to the Kremlin in 2012 after the four-year interregnum as prime minister.

Putin had not miscalculated in his actions against Crimea and later in eastern Ukraine. He simply no longer cared how the West would respond. The change in Putin’s demeanor became acute after the downing of Flight 17, according to his old friend, Sergei Roldugin. “I noticed that the more he is being teased the tougher he becomes,” Roldugin said. It was as if the political upheaval in Ukraine affected Putin deeply and personally, like a taunt on the schoolyard that forced him to lash out. Merkel, according to Roldugin, infuriated him by being dismissive of the concerns he raised about the radicals in the ranks of Ukraine’s new
government, about the threats to the country’s Russian minority, about the atrocities being committed by Ukrainian troops against civilians. Everyone wanted to blame him for the missile that destroyed the airliner, but what about the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian government against those in the east? Where once he had been patient with Merkel and other leaders, he was now annoyed; where once compromising, he was now unbending. “All this has annoyed him and he has become more—I don’t want to say aggressive—but more indifferent,” Roldugin explained. “He knows that we shall resolve it one way or another, but he does not want to compromise anymore.”

For Putin, the personal had become policy. The pragmatism of his first two terms as president had long before ended, but now the upheaval in Ukraine signaled a fundamental break in the trajectory that he had followed since Yeltsin unexpectedly handed him the presidency at the dawn of the new millennium. For fourteen years in power, he had focused on restoring Russia to its place among the world’s powers by integrating into a globalized economy, profiting from and exploiting the financial institutions of the free market—banks, stock markets, trading houses—to the benefit of those tycoons closest to him, of course, but also Russians generally. Now he would reassert Russia’s power with or without the recognition of the West, shunning its “universal” values, its democracy and rule of law, as something alien to Russia, something intended not to include Russia but to subjugate it. The nation became “hostage to the psychosomatic quirks of its leader,” the novelist Vladimir Sorokin wrote after the annexation. “All his fears, passions, weaknesses, and complexes become state policy. If he is paranoid, the whole country must fear enemies and spies; if he has insomnia, all the ministries must work at night; if he’s a teetotaler, everyone must stop drinking; if he’s a drunk, everyone should booze it up; if he doesn’t like America, which his beloved KGB fought against, the whole population must dislike the United States.”
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Opposition to Putin—to Putinism—continued to exist, but the events of 2014 drove it even further toward the margins of society. The leaders who did pose a challenge, or might once have, were under siege more than ever. Some left even before the events in Ukraine, including Garry Kasparov, who feared his imminent arrest after Aleksandr Bastrykin’s investigative committee telephoned and spoke to his mother while he was traveling. A telephone call from the committee was now as ominous a warning as the KGB’s knock on the door had once been.
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Kasparov was followed by others hounded out of Russia by investigators: the economist Sergei Guriev, who had advised Medvedev; a former central banker, Sergei Aleksashenko; and one of Aleksei Navalny’s deputies who worked on his anti-corruption campaign, Vladimir Askurov, who received political asylum in Britain. Pavel Durov, the creator of Russia’s version of Facebook, called VKontakte, and an example of a dynamic new generation of Russians, sold his remaining stake in the company and left the country, saying later, “Since I’m obviously a believer in free markets, it’s hard for me to understand the current direction of the country.”
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Boris Berezovsky, the man who claimed to be Putin’s progenitor and became his biggest nemesis, died outside of London in 2013, ostensibly a suicide, hung by a cord in his bathroom. As ever when Berezovsky was involved, suspicion of a more nefarious end to his life never subsided entirely. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, amnestied by Putin in the winter of 2013, relocated to Switzerland and reopened his Open Russia once again to promote democracy in Russia. He offered himself as a potential leader of a provisional government that might one day serve as a transition to a new Russia, but he dared not return to the country.

At home, those who challenged the Kremlin’s narrative on Ukraine were shunned. A prominent historian, Andrei Zubov, was fired from his post at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations for comparing the annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s Anschluss in Austria in 1938, an event, he noted, that was followed by war and finally the fall of the Third Reich. “Friends,” he implored in
Vedomosti
, “history repeats itself.”
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His ostracism was as swift and severe as the satirist Viktor Shenderovich’s lament over a skater’s gold at the Olympics.
Vedomosti
’s founding editor, Leonid Bershidsky, announced his own exile in a newspaper column not long afterward, speaking for a generation of intelligentsia who saw Putin’s Russia as no longer compatible with the relative freedoms to which they had grown accustomed. He wrote in
The Moscow Times
that he was not a panicked rat abandoning the sinking Russian ship. “I am more a sailor who, seeing that the captain had changed course toward a port of ill repute—and with loudspeakers blaring his intent—quietly, and without panicking, lowered the lifeboat and began rowing toward the port for which all of us had originally set sail.”
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Others stayed on, fighting an increasingly lonely battle against Putin and the forces of nationalism he had unleashed. Alesksei Navalny, after being arrested while protesting the verdicts in the Bolotnaya cases at the
closing of the Sochi Olympics, spent most of 2014 under house arrest, confined to his small apartment in a Soviet-era block in southern Moscow. The only opposition leader to have emerged from the grassroots of society—one who was not beholden to the Kremlin and charismatic enough to win a following independent of its influence—was forbidden for months from meeting anyone except his relatives and from using the Internet, the medium he had used so effectively to make himself a threat to Putin’s system. With surveillance equipment brazenly installed around his apartment, he whiled away his days playing Grand Theft Auto, leaving only to attend court hearings, accompanied by a police escort. With prosecutors opening new cases—including one involving a “stolen” street poster as a gift and another that would send his brother, Oleg, to prison—his court appearances became more and more regular. The Kremlin’s shadow loomed over him as it had the dissidents of the past.

“What have we won?” he said inside his apartment at the end of 2014, when the terms of his arrest were eased somewhat, musing on Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the international demonization that followed in its wake. “Now literally no one likes us,” he said. Even Ukraine, a natural ally, now hated Russia, if not Russians. The war overshadowed the work of Navalny’s anticorruption campaign, which continued to expose the neo-feudal links between power and money. It became a war against all things Western, including those who would advocate for greater political openness and transparency. It permeated society, even the nightly weather reports Navalny watched on television, which took to warning that the situation in eastern Ukraine was “heating up.” Putin had plunged the country into “a perpetual war” and thus “a perpetual mobilization,” Navalny said. He rallied the country behind a manifest destiny that it had once lost, regardless of the cost in international standing. And yet, the more disastrous Putin’s decisions were, the more powerful he became. With the country at war, his position seemed even more unassailable. It was a contradiction that Navalny, like others at home and abroad, struggled to understand. “In terms of strengthening his regime, Putin won,” he said with an air of resignation. “In terms of Russia’s strategic interests, we lost.”
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