We met in a plain, medium-size conference room, dominated by a large oval table. Each of us was provided with mineral water, coffee, and a little plate of pastries. Condi and I were accompanied by our very able ambassador, Bill Burns, and an interpreter. Putin was joined by the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov; the defense minister, Serdyukov; the chief of the general staff, General Baluyevskiy; and an interpreter. We had no sooner sat down than the room was flooded with press, shoving and pushing. Putin’s press audience in place, he harangued us for nearly ten minutes, mainly about missile defense. He was sarcastic: “We may decide someday to put missile defense systems on the moon, but before we get to that, we may lose a chance for agreement because of you implementing your own plans.” He warned us against “forcing forward your previous agreements with Eastern European countries.” Condi and I weren’t too happy about being used as stage props but kept our game faces and, in the brief moment we were allowed to respond before the Russians shooed out the press, tried to put a positive spin on the opportunities to work together. After the press left, the secretary of state and I looked at each other and just rolled our eyes. Putin’s dacha, Putin’s show.
When we got down to business, Putin continued to insist that our plans were aimed at Russia because Iran was not a near-term threat to either the United States or Europe. He shared with us a map featuring circles that showed the ranges of different Iranian missiles and the few countries they could reach. He said the circles, which appeared to be hand-drawn with a grammar school compass and colored pencils, represented the best estimates of Russian intelligence. I flippantly told him he needed a new intelligence service. He was not amused. As prearranged with Condi, I then laid out our new offerings, meant to persuade the Russians that the Polish and Czech sites were no threat to them, and to get them to work with us. We offered a new proposal for joint cooperation in developing a missile defense architecture that would defend the United States, Europe, and Russia; accepted Putin’s offer for radar information sharing, with a view to creating an integrated command and control of U.S. and Russian missile defenses; proposed transparency measures, including personnel exchanges that would allow the Russians to monitor our system and for us to participate in their system; and, as I said, suggested the possibility of tying our missile defense deployments in Europe to development of the Iranian missile threat, including joint monitoring of Iranian developments and a commitment to make our system operational only when warranted by the evolving threat. Putin seemed genuinely interested in these ideas and acknowledged that we had made some interesting proposals. Indeed, all the Russian officials except for General Baluyevskiy seemed convinced that the United States was sincerely interested in cooperating with Russia, and we agreed that experts would meet to flesh out our ideas.
During the meeting with Putin, I wrote a note to Condi that Baluyevskiy reminded me of “the good old days,” and she wrote back, “He was once considered a forward-leaning moderate. Shows how much has changed.” After several hours of meetings with our counterparts later that same day, I wrote Condi another note: “I don’t have the patience for diplomacy. I’d forgotten how much I really don’t like these guys.” A little later Condi, Ambassador Burns and his wife, and I were hosted for dinner by Sergei Ivanov and his wife. After dinner I told Condi, “Well, I do like some of them.”
The next morning I gave a speech at the General Staff Academy, another monument of Stalinist architecture, to several hundred Russian officers. From the moment I walked into the room, I knew this would be a tough event. The general in charge was an old bull out of Red Army central casting, and the pale, frowning faces in the audience radiated skepticism and resentment. I talked about reform efforts under way in both our militaries and the opportunities for cooperation in the future. These officers were not buying what I was selling: they were deeply suspicious of the United States, our military, and me, and they probably hated the reform efforts in their own military. During the question-and-answer period, a colonel asked me why the United States wanted to take over Siberia. After years of handling off-the-wall questions from members of Congress, I thought I was pretty quick on my feet, but that question really threw me. So I simply said that there was no truth to that idea. Bill Burns told me later that Madeleine Albright had given a speech a few weeks before in which she posed the question of how Russia could develop Siberia as it became depopulated and Russia’s overall population continued to shrink. That the colonel and others had reached the conclusion they did based on her question was, to me, a measure of Russian paranoia.
Like Sisyphus trying to roll that rock uphill, we kept at it with the Russians on missile defense in 2008. The Russians felt that the written version of what Condi and I had offered at Putin’s dacha “diluted” what we had said. The only change made in the written version was to note that the presence of Russian officers at our sites in Poland and the Czech Republic would, of course, require the consent of those governments. Nonetheless I told Ivanov at the Munich Security Conference in February that we had been thinking about how to achieve progress on missile defense and strategic arms control before President Bush left office. If an outline of agreements on these issues could be achieved, I said, Condi and I would be willing to move up the next “two plus two” meeting and come to Moscow again. The two presidents subsequently talked, and on March 12 Bush sent Putin a letter laying out opportunities for agreement and progress in the bilateral relationship before his term ended. Our ace in the hole was that Putin desperately wanted Bush to visit Sochi, future site of the Olympics, after the NATO summit in Bucharest in early April. Bush made no commitments, waiting to see how Putin would behave in Bucharest.
Condi and I converged on Moscow on March 17 and later that day met with President-elect Dimitri Medvedev and then separately with Putin. The atmosphere during this visit was even better than the previous October. The Russians were interested in moving forward with continuity as the Bush administration came to an end and Medvedev assumed the Russian presidency. Still, I told my staff beforehand that I thought the odds for progress on a Strategic Framework Agreement on this trip were a hundred to one against, and that the obstacles in the path of progress with Russia on NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine as well as for Kosovo independence were too great to be overcome.
I was struck by how diminutive Medvedev was, about my height—five foot eight—but probably thirty pounds lighter. He was on top of his brief, knowledgeable and impressive, but I had no doubt Putin was calling the shots.
We met with Putin in the Kremlin, in a beautiful oval room with high, lime-green and white walls—and more gold leaf. Our session was scheduled for an hour but lasted two. He said he had carefully analyzed the president’s letter, and there were many issues to discuss. During the meeting, Condi handed Putin a draft Strategic Framework Declaration addressing some twenty proposals for cooperation or agreement in four areas: promoting security (including strategic arms limits and missile defense); preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction; combating global terrorism; and strengthening economic cooperation. We managed to clarify some of the proposals relating to missile defense that had become muddled since the October meeting, including Russian presence at the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and discussed the next steps for negotiating additional limits on strategic nuclear forces. With regard to the latter subject, I said we were prepared to consider a legally binding treaty but that it should be short and adaptable to changing circumstances. I noted that I had been involved in the first strategic arms treaty in 1972 and that the last thing we needed was an agreement the size of a telephone book. To which Putin responded, “You are really old.” I laughed and nodded in agreement.