Later, Yanukovych also began to question again how much Ukraine was paying for its Russian gas. (The deal signed by Tymoshenko with Putin in 2009 was deemed so unfavourable that she was jailed for abuse of office.) In summer 2011 Yanukovych demanded that Russia halve its prices, to less than $200. As for Ukraine’s westward orientation, although plans to join NATO were dropped, Yanukovych continued to move towards closer integration with the EU – spurning Putin’s attempts to woo him into a free-trade agreement with Russia.
The Obama effect
In the summer and autumn of 2008, while Russia was gazing at its Georgian navel, its leadership failed to notice that on the other side of the world something important was happening. George W. Bush, Putin’s nemesis for the past eight years, would soon stand down, and there was every chance that the November presidential election would be won by a young, liberal black man who was enthralling the entire world. Firstly, the Russians did not believe that a black candidate could possibly beat Senator John McCain. But they also refused to believe that if Barack Obama did win anything would change. I remember sitting in a Kremlin office trying to explain to officials that an Obama victory looked very likely and that it could present a real opportunity to improve relations. They should start thinking now about how to reach out to him. The reaction was a smirk and a shrug of the shoulders: ‘Nothing will change. It’s all the same people.’
Russia really was stuck in a time-warp. It was not just the West that still treated Russia as essentially a communist country minus a few of the trimmings. Russia also suffered from a world view shaped by Cold War-era Pravda cartoons of Uncle Sam feeding the ‘military-industrial complex’ with one hand and launching missiles at the Soviet Union with the other. For them, Barack Obama was just a product of the system, and nothing would change.
On 4 November Obama was elected, to a parade of delirious headlines almost everywhere. Whatever else was true, Obama was not George W. Bush, and for many people it seemed like the dawn of a new era. President Medvedev had been preparing for his first state-of-the-nation speech for some weeks – it was first announced for late October, then rescheduled for 5 November. As news of Obama’s victory came in, the Kremlin’s PR firm, Ketchum, quickly sent a recommendation that this was the ideal chance to make an overture to the new president, with some warm words about future cooperation. But it was not just Ketchum’s advice that failed to get through; it was as if nobody had bothered to pass on the news that Obama had won.
Medvedev spoke for an hour and half in the dazzling white hall of the Great Kremlin Palace, but he did not even mention Obama’s name, far less congratulate him. He did, however, blame US foreign policy for the war in Georgia, and he announced that Russia might deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, bordering Poland, to neutralise Bush’s missile defence system.
The next day’s headlines recorded a missed chance. ‘Russian President Dmitry Medvedev orders missiles deployed in Europe as world hails Obama,’ said the London Times. ‘Russia gives Obama brisk warning,’ said the Washington Post.
It has often been pointed out that Russia’s foreign policy is essentially reactive, and this was certainly largely the case throughout the Putin years. He made few, if any, initiatives off his own bat: as we have seen, he expected NATO to ‘invite’ Russia to join, he responded to the 9/11 attacks with positive gestures, and to NATO expansion and missile defence plans with negative ones – but he rarely came out with initiatives of his own for others to react to. The same was clearly going to be the case now: Russia’s foreign policy might change, but only if the Americans made the first move.
Obama chose Stanford University professor Michael McFaul as his chief Russia adviser, and the new team immediately came up with a new, pragmatic philosophy which they called ‘dual-track engagement’. It meant that the administration would not link country-to-country relations with Russian behaviour on human rights or democracy. It would continue to challenge the Kremlin robustly on its human rights record and over its occupation of Georgia, but it would not make diplomatic or military cooperation in other areas (on Iran, for example, or missile defence) hostage to that. The two would operate on separate tracks. ‘The idea’s very simple,’ McFaul says. ‘We’re going to engage with the Russian government on issues that are of mutual interest and we’re going to engage directly with Russian civil society, including Russian political opposition figures, on things that we consider are important as well.’1
The first public hint of a new approach came in a speech by Vice-President Joe Biden at the Munich Security Conference in February 2009. This was the same venue where two years earlier Putin had virtually turned his back on the United States. ‘The last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and members of our alliance,’ Biden said. Now, the US wanted to ‘press the reset button’. The phrase quickly became shorthand for Obama’s new approach to Russia. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn it into a television image a month later by presenting her opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, with a large red button marked ‘reset’. The word was unfortunately rendered into Russian as ‘overload’ or ‘overcharged’ – which at least ensured some smiles as the policy was formally inaugurated.
Behind the scenes, more important resetting was getting under way. A week after Biden’s speech, Michael McFaul went to Moscow to hand-deliver a personal letter from Obama to Medvedev. The letter was intended to be a kind of bait, laid outside the cave to tempt the growling bear to come out. ‘We are taking a careful look at the missile defence programme,’ it said, hinting that it should become an issue for cooperation, not confrontation. The letter laid out in big, broad terms a vision of US–Russian relations which recognised that, in fact, America’s interests were by and large also Russia’s interests, and they should be looking for ‘win-win’ situations rather than the ‘zero-sum’ attitude that had dogged the past.
The bear sniffed the package and seemed to like it. Medvedev had his first face-to-face meeting with Obama in London on 1 April, on the margins of a G20 summit convened to tackle the global financial crisis. They got through the preliminaries – how nice that we’re both young, both lawyers, both new to the job – and then Obama decided to try out his new ‘win-win’ approach on a troublesome example that had recently arisen. A few months earlier, President Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan had suddenly announced he wanted the Americans to leave the Manas air base, a vital transit centre for the Afghan war, having been leant on – and bribed – by the Russians. Bakiyev’s decision came on the same day as Russia offered Kyrgyzstan a $2 billion loan. Sitting together in the US ambassador’s Regent’s Park residence, Obama explained to Medvedev, a trifle condescendingly, why it was in Russia’s interest to let the Americans stay at Manas: ‘I need you to understand why we have this base here. It supports our activities in Afghanistan. It’s where our troops fly in and out of Afghanistan. They take showers. They have hot meals and they get ready to go in to fight in Afghanistan, to deal with enemies of ours that are also enemies of yours. And if we weren’t fighting these people, you would have to be fighting these people. So tell me, President Medvedev, why is that not in your national interest, that we would have this base of operations that helps what we’re doing in Afghanistan?’ Medvedev did not respond immediately. But three months later the Americans signed a deal that allowed them to stay at Manas.