Person in the news
March 7, 2014 7:03 pm
Vladimir Putin, strongman of Russia gambling on western weakness
The president’s stance hardened when his position weakened, say Kathrin Hille and Neil Buckley
As western leaders struggle to respond to the stranglehold Russia has put on Crimea, it is beginning to dawn on them that for Vladimir Putin, this fight started a long time ago.
Within a week, Russia’s president has had his men bring the peninsula on the Black Sea under his control, called the future of the Ukrainian state into question and forced governments from Warsaw to Washington into crisis mode.
Surprising as this crisis may have been for Europe and the US, for Mr Putin it is the explosion of a grudge that has been building for most of his 14 years in power, a period when he has gone from flint-faced former communist spy to swaggering leader at ease with the trappings of traditional, conservative Russia. “He is disillusioned with the west,” says Igor Yurgens, a former Kremlin adviser. In Mr Putin’s eyes, the revolution in Kiev is only the latest in a long chain of western attempts to encircle and weaken his country.
Given the Russian president’s background, hostility to the west almost seems predictable. Born into a working-class family in 1952 in what was then Leningrad, Mr Putin spent his early years with his parents living in one room of a kommunalka, a communal flat. A childhood taste for rowdiness was tempered in his teenage years when he embraced the discipline of martial arts. He also volunteered to join the KGB, an ambition he realised in his early twenties.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – an event he has described as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century – Mr Putin swapped spying for politics, first in his home town of St Petersburg (as Leningrad was once more called) and then Moscow, where he joined the presidential office under Boris Yeltsin. Within five years he was handpicked by Yeltsin to succeed him as president.
His expectation that Nato expansion would stop at the German border was disappointed. So were hopes that the western alliance would not build a missile defence shield in Europe and that Moscow would reclaim its global role as an equal to the US. Mr Putin began to take the rebuffs personally. “He is very good at telling people what he knows they want to hear,” says a former US official. “But when issues come up, he can be very quick to bristle and get quite angry.”
Then came the Orange revolution. When Ukrainians took to the streets in 2004 and overturned an election marred by fraud, Mr Putin suspected a giant western intrigue to encircle Russia. “Putin was shocked, he wouldn’t talk to any western leader for days,” says a senior western diplomat. Mr Putin also came under pressure from hardline former security officials in his inner circle who saw Ukraine as a major strategic setback. “You started to hear for the first time suggestions that he might not make it to the end of his second term,” says the diplomat, who served in Moscow.
“Those days changed everything,” says a person whose family is close to Mr Putin and who remembers a “brooding” president.
Mr Putin began to crack down on political dissent, tighten his grip on the legislature, the regions and the judiciary – a reaction he has repeated following the latest unrest in Ukraine. Mr Putin’s heavy hand has all but smothered Russia’s civil society, says Gleb Pavlovsky, another former Kremlin adviser. “This is the collapse of the Russian intellectual class,” he says. “I think that’s an even worse disaster than what’s happening in Crimea.” On the international stage the hardening of Mr Putin’s attitude was signalled in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, which former aides say pointed to what was to come.
Mr Putin railed against the US and warned Nato off Georgia. A year later he returned to Munich to deliver a veiled warning about western attempts to draw in Ukraine. “And yet again, they didn’t take him seriously,” says Mr Yurgens. The first time Mr Putin made real his threat – the five-day war with Georgia in 2008 – left relations with the US seriously damaged. Since then, the crises that emanated from the Arab uprising have further cemented Mr Putin’s belief that the US is engaged in dangerous “experiments” around the world.
While it is impossible for outsiders to tell when Mr Putin decided to move on Ukraine, there is consensus that it was long planned. “The level of precision with which this has all been rolled out is astounding,” says the former US official. The question is where Mr Putin goes from here. If Russia is targeted with tough financial sanctions, the resulting damage could quickly undermine his power. “He has taken a big gamble but he can’t go back,” says the person with personal ties to Mr Putin. The calculus seems to be that Russia will get to keep Crimea as the west will not risk conflict. Some Russian experts therefore have little more than scorn for German chancellor Angela Merkel’s reported observation that Mr Putin is out of touch with reality.
“People in the west think Putin is irrational or crazy. In fact he’s very rational according to his own logic, and very well prepared,” says Andrei Illarionov, a former Putin adviser who is now one of his fiercest critics. “It is not Putin who is out of touch with reality – it is the west.”
The writers are respectively the FT’s Moscow bureau chief and eastern Europe editor
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.
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