PARIS — Speaking in what he called “the language of Goethe, Schiller and Kant,” picked up during his time as a K.G.B. officer in Dresden, President Vladimir V. Putin addressed the German Parliament on Sept. 25, 2001. “Russia is a friendly European nation,” he declared. “Stable peace on the continent is a paramount goal for our nation.”
The Russian leader, elected the previous year at the age of 47 after a meteoric rise from obscurity, went on to describe “democratic rights and freedoms” as the “key goal of Russia’s domestic policy.” Members of the Bundestag gave a standing ovation, moved by the reconciliation Mr. Putin seemed to embody in a city, Berlin, that long symbolized division between the West and the totalitarian Soviet world.
Norbert Röttgen, a center-right representative who headed the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee for several years, was among those who rose to their feet. “Putin captured us,” he said. “The voice was quite soft, in German, a voice that tempts you to believe what is said to you. We had some reason to think there was a viable perspective of togetherness.”
Today, all togetherness shredded, Ukraine burns, bludgeoned by the invading army Mr. Putin sent to prove his conviction that Ukrainian nationhood is a myth. More than 3.7 million Ukrainians are refugees; the dead mount up in a month-old war; and that purring voice of Mr. Putin has morphed into the angry rant of a hunched man dismissing as “scum and traitors” any Russian who resists the violence of his tightening dictatorship.
ImageThe Retroville Mall in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, was in ruins after being shelled by Russian forces this week.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
A refugee family from Ukraine arriving at a train station in Budapest this month.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
His opponents, a “fifth column” manipulated by the West, will meet an ugly fate, Mr. Putin vowed this month, grimacing as his planned blitzkrieg in Ukraine stalled. True Russians, he said, would “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths” and so achieve “a necessary self-purification of society.”
This was less the language of Kant than of fascist nationalist exaltation laced with Mr. Putin’s hardscrabble, brawling St. Petersburg youth.
Between these voices of reason and incitation, between these two seemingly different men, lie 22 years of power and five American presidents. As China rose, as America fought and lost its forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as technology networked the world, a Russian enigma took form in the Kremlin.
Did the United States and its allies, through excess of optimism or naïveté, simply get Mr. Putin wrong from the outset? Or was he transformed over time into the revanchist warmonger of today, whether because of perceived Western provocation, gathering grievance, or the giddying intoxication of prolonged and — since Covid-19 — increasingly isolated rule?
Mr. Putin is an enigma, but he is also the most public of figures. Seen from the perspective of his reckless gamble in Ukraine, a picture emerges of a man who seized on almost every move by the West as a slight against Russia — and perhaps also himself. As the grievances mounted, piece by piece, year by year, the distinction blurred. In effect, he became the state, he merged with Russia, their fates fused in an increasingly Messianic vision of restored imperial glory.
From the Ashes of Empire
“The temptation of the West for Putin was, I think, chiefly that he saw it as instrumental to building a great Russia,” said Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state who met several times with Mr. Putin during the first phase of his rule. “He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.”
But if irredentist resentment lurked, alongside a Soviet spy’s suspicion of the United States, Mr. Putin had other initial priorities. He was a patriotic servant of the state. The post-communist Russia of the 1990s, led by Boris N. Yeltsin, the country’s first freely elected leader, had sundered.
In 1993, Mr. Yeltsin ordered the Parliament shelled to put down an insurgency; 147 people were killed. The West had to provide Russia with humanitarian aid, so dire was its economic collapse, so pervasive its extreme poverty, as large swaths of industry were sold off for a song to an emergent class of oligarchs. All this, to Mr. Putin, represented mayhem. It was humiliation.
His opponents, a “fifth column” manipulated by the West, will meet an ugly fate, Mr. Putin vowed this month, grimacing as his planned blitzkrieg in Ukraine stalled. True Russians, he said, would “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths” and so achieve “a necessary self-purification of society.”
This was less the language of Kant than of fascist nationalist exaltation laced with Mr. Putin’s hardscrabble, brawling St. Petersburg youth.
Between these voices of reason and incitation, between these two seemingly different men, lie 22 years of power and five American presidents. As China rose, as America fought and lost its forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as technology networked the world, a Russian enigma took form in the Kremlin.
Did the United States and its allies, through excess of optimism or naïveté, simply get Mr. Putin wrong from the outset? Or was he transformed over time into the revanchist warmonger of today, whether because of perceived Western provocation, gathering grievance, or the giddying intoxication of prolonged and — since Covid-19 — increasingly isolated rule?
Mr. Putin is an enigma, but he is also the most public of figures. Seen from the perspective of his reckless gamble in Ukraine, a picture emerges of a man who seized on almost every move by the West as a slight against Russia — and perhaps also himself. As the grievances mounted, piece by piece, year by year, the distinction blurred. In effect, he became the state, he merged with Russia, their fates fused in an increasingly Messianic vision of restored imperial glory.
From the Ashes of Empire
“The temptation of the West for Putin was, I think, chiefly that he saw it as instrumental to building a great Russia,” said Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state who met several times with Mr. Putin during the first phase of his rule. “He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.”
But if irredentist resentment lurked, alongside a Soviet spy’s suspicion of the United States, Mr. Putin had other initial priorities. He was a patriotic servant of the state. The post-communist Russia of the 1990s, led by Boris N. Yeltsin, the country’s first freely elected leader, had sundered.
In 1993, Mr. Yeltsin ordered the Parliament shelled to put down an insurgency; 147 people were killed. The West had to provide Russia with humanitarian aid, so dire was its economic collapse, so pervasive its extreme poverty, as large swaths of industry were sold off for a song to an emergent class of oligarchs. All this, to Mr. Putin, represented mayhem. It was humiliation.
Protesters climbed onto tanks in Moscow in August 1991 after Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, was briefly removed from power by hardliners.Credit...Boris Yurchenko/Associated Press
In 1993, Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Putin’s predecessor, ordered Russia’s Parliament shelled to put down an insurgency.Credit...Sergei Karpukhin/Associated Press
“He hated what happened to Russia, hated the idea the West had to help it,” said Christoph Heusgen, the chief diplomatic adviser to former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany between 2005 and 2017. Mr. Putin’s first political manifesto for the 2000 presidential campaign was all about reversing Western efforts to transfer power from the state to the marketplace. “For Russians,” he wrote, “a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against.” Quite the contrary, “it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change.”
But Mr. Putin was no Marxist, even if he reinstated the Stalin-era national anthem. He had seen the disaster of a centralized planned economy, both in Russia and East Germany, where he served as a K.G.B. agent between 1985 and 1990.
The new president would work with the oligarchs created by chaotic, free-market, crony capitalism — so long as they showed absolute fealty. Failing that, they would be expunged. If this was democracy, it was “sovereign democracy,” a phrase embraced by Mr. Putin’s top political strategists, stress on the first word.
Marked, to some degree, by his home city of St. Petersburg, built by Peter the Great in the early 18th century as a “window to Europe,” and by his initial political experience there from 1991 working in the mayor’s office to attract foreign investment, Mr. Putin does appear to have been guardedly open to the West early in his rule.
He mentioned the possibility of Russian membership of NATO to President Bill Clinton in 2000, an idea that never went anywhere. He maintained a Russian partnership agreement signed with the European Union in 1994. A NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002. Petersburg man vied with Homo Sovieticus.
This was a delicate balancing act, for which the disciplined Mr. Putin was prepared. “You should never lose control,” he told the American movie director Oliver Stone in “The Putin Interviews,” a 2017 documentary. He once described himself as “an expert in human relations.” German lawmakers were not alone in being seduced by this man of impassive features and implacable intent, honed as an intelligence operative.
“You must understand, he is from the K.G.B., lying is his profession, it is not a sin,” said Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2017 to 2020. “He is like a mirror, adapting to what he sees, in the way he was trained.”
A few months before the Bundestag speech, Mr. Putin famously won over President George W. Bush, who, after their first meeting in June 2001, said he had looked into the Russian president’s eyes, gotten “a sense of his soul” and found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Mr. Yeltsin, similarly swayed, anointed Mr. Putin as his successor just three years after he arrived in Moscow in 1996.
“He hated what happened to Russia, hated the idea the West had to help it,” said Christoph Heusgen, the chief diplomatic adviser to former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany between 2005 and 2017. Mr. Putin’s first political manifesto for the 2000 presidential campaign was all about reversing Western efforts to transfer power from the state to the marketplace. “For Russians,” he wrote, “a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against.” Quite the contrary, “it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change.”
But Mr. Putin was no Marxist, even if he reinstated the Stalin-era national anthem. He had seen the disaster of a centralized planned economy, both in Russia and East Germany, where he served as a K.G.B. agent between 1985 and 1990.
The new president would work with the oligarchs created by chaotic, free-market, crony capitalism — so long as they showed absolute fealty. Failing that, they would be expunged. If this was democracy, it was “sovereign democracy,” a phrase embraced by Mr. Putin’s top political strategists, stress on the first word.
Marked, to some degree, by his home city of St. Petersburg, built by Peter the Great in the early 18th century as a “window to Europe,” and by his initial political experience there from 1991 working in the mayor’s office to attract foreign investment, Mr. Putin does appear to have been guardedly open to the West early in his rule.
He mentioned the possibility of Russian membership of NATO to President Bill Clinton in 2000, an idea that never went anywhere. He maintained a Russian partnership agreement signed with the European Union in 1994. A NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002. Petersburg man vied with Homo Sovieticus.
This was a delicate balancing act, for which the disciplined Mr. Putin was prepared. “You should never lose control,” he told the American movie director Oliver Stone in “The Putin Interviews,” a 2017 documentary. He once described himself as “an expert in human relations.” German lawmakers were not alone in being seduced by this man of impassive features and implacable intent, honed as an intelligence operative.
“You must understand, he is from the K.G.B., lying is his profession, it is not a sin,” said Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2017 to 2020. “He is like a mirror, adapting to what he sees, in the way he was trained.”
A few months before the Bundestag speech, Mr. Putin famously won over President George W. Bush, who, after their first meeting in June 2001, said he had looked into the Russian president’s eyes, gotten “a sense of his soul” and found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Mr. Yeltsin, similarly swayed, anointed Mr. Putin as his successor just three years after he arrived in Moscow in 1996.
Mr. Putin, then the prime minister, with Mr. Yeltsin as he left the Kremlin in 1999.Credit...TASS, via Getty Images
“Stable peace on the continent is a paramount goal for our nation,” Mr. Putin told German lawmakers in 2001. Credit...Fritz Reiss/Associated Press
“Putin orients himself very precisely to a person,” Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man before he served a decade in a Siberian penal colony and had his company forcibly broken up, told me in an interview in 2016 in Washington. “If he wants you to like him, you will like him.”
The previous time I had seen Mr. Khodorkovsky, in Moscow in October 2003, was just days before his arrest by armed agents on embezzlement charges. He had been talking to me then about his bold political ambitions — a lèse-majesté unacceptable to Mr. Putin.
An Authoritarian’s Rise
The wooded presidential estate outside Moscow was comfortable but not ornate. In 2003, Mr. Putin’s personal tastes did not yet run to palatial grandiosity. Security guards lounged around, gawking at TVs showing fashion models on the runways of Milan and Paris.
Mr. Putin, as he likes to do, kept us waiting for many hours. It seemed a small demonstration of one-upmanship, a minor incivility he would inflict even on Ms. Rice, similar to bringing his dog into a meeting with Ms. Merkel in 2007 when he knew she was scared of dogs.
“I understand why he has to do this,” Ms. Merkel said. “To prove he’s a man.”
When the interview with three New York Times journalists at last began, Mr. Putin was cordial and focused, comfortable in his strong command of detail. “We firmly stand on the path of development of democracy and of a market economy,” he said, adding, “By their mentality and culture, the people of Russia are Europeans.”
He spoke of “good, close relations” with the Bush administration, despite the Iraq war, and said “the main principles of humanism — human rights, freedom of speech — remain fundamental for all countries.” The greatest lesson of his education, he said, was “respect for the law.”
At this time, Mr. Putin had already clamped down on independent media; prosecuted a brutal war in Chechnya involving the leveling of Grozny, its capital; and placed security officials — known as siloviki — front and center in his governance. Often, they were old St. Petersburg buddies, like Nikolai Patrushev, now the secretary of Mr. Putin’s security council. The first rule of an intelligence officer is suspicion.
“Putin orients himself very precisely to a person,” Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man before he served a decade in a Siberian penal colony and had his company forcibly broken up, told me in an interview in 2016 in Washington. “If he wants you to like him, you will like him.”
The previous time I had seen Mr. Khodorkovsky, in Moscow in October 2003, was just days before his arrest by armed agents on embezzlement charges. He had been talking to me then about his bold political ambitions — a lèse-majesté unacceptable to Mr. Putin.
An Authoritarian’s Rise
The wooded presidential estate outside Moscow was comfortable but not ornate. In 2003, Mr. Putin’s personal tastes did not yet run to palatial grandiosity. Security guards lounged around, gawking at TVs showing fashion models on the runways of Milan and Paris.
Mr. Putin, as he likes to do, kept us waiting for many hours. It seemed a small demonstration of one-upmanship, a minor incivility he would inflict even on Ms. Rice, similar to bringing his dog into a meeting with Ms. Merkel in 2007 when he knew she was scared of dogs.
“I understand why he has to do this,” Ms. Merkel said. “To prove he’s a man.”
When the interview with three New York Times journalists at last began, Mr. Putin was cordial and focused, comfortable in his strong command of detail. “We firmly stand on the path of development of democracy and of a market economy,” he said, adding, “By their mentality and culture, the people of Russia are Europeans.”
He spoke of “good, close relations” with the Bush administration, despite the Iraq war, and said “the main principles of humanism — human rights, freedom of speech — remain fundamental for all countries.” The greatest lesson of his education, he said, was “respect for the law.”
At this time, Mr. Putin had already clamped down on independent media; prosecuted a brutal war in Chechnya involving the leveling of Grozny, its capital; and placed security officials — known as siloviki — front and center in his governance. Often, they were old St. Petersburg buddies, like Nikolai Patrushev, now the secretary of Mr. Putin’s security council. The first rule of an intelligence officer is suspicion.
Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, in 2000. Mr. Putin ordered the city razed to put down a separatist movement.Credit...Dmitry Belyakov/Associated Press
Russian soldiers watched an oil well burn in northern Chechnya in late 1999.Credit...James Hill for The New York Times
When asked about his methods, the president bristled, suggesting America could not claim any moral high ground. “We have a proverb in Russia,” he said. “One should not criticize a mirror if you have a crooked face.”
The overriding impression was of a man divided behind his unflinching gaze. Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin,” said there was “a varnish of liberalism to his discourse in the early 2000s,” but the pull of restoring Russian imperial might, and so avenging Russia’s perceived relegation to what President Barack Obama would call “a regional power,” was always Mr. Putin’s deepest urge.
Born in 1952 in a city then called Leningrad, Mr. Putin grew up in the shadow of the Soviets’ war with Nazi Germany, known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War. His father was badly wounded, an older brother died during the brutal 872-day German siege of the city, and a grandfather had worked for Stalin as a cook. The immense sacrifices of the Red Army in defeating Nazism were not abstract but palpable within his modest family, as for many Russians of his generation. Mr. Putin learned young that, as he put it, “the weak get beat.”
“The West did not take sufficient account of the strength of Soviet myth, military sacrifice and revanchism in him,” Mr. Eltchaninoff, whose grandparents were all Russian, said. “He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort.”
When asked about his methods, the president bristled, suggesting America could not claim any moral high ground. “We have a proverb in Russia,” he said. “One should not criticize a mirror if you have a crooked face.”
The overriding impression was of a man divided behind his unflinching gaze. Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin,” said there was “a varnish of liberalism to his discourse in the early 2000s,” but the pull of restoring Russian imperial might, and so avenging Russia’s perceived relegation to what President Barack Obama would call “a regional power,” was always Mr. Putin’s deepest urge.
Born in 1952 in a city then called Leningrad, Mr. Putin grew up in the shadow of the Soviets’ war with Nazi Germany, known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War. His father was badly wounded, an older brother died during the brutal 872-day German siege of the city, and a grandfather had worked for Stalin as a cook. The immense sacrifices of the Red Army in defeating Nazism were not abstract but palpable within his modest family, as for many Russians of his generation. Mr. Putin learned young that, as he put it, “the weak get beat.”
“The West did not take sufficient account of the strength of Soviet myth, military sacrifice and revanchism in him,” Mr. Eltchaninoff, whose grandparents were all Russian, said. “He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort.”
The Motherland Calls, a statue in Volgograd, Russia, commemorates soldiers killed in the Battle of Stalingrad.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Stalingrad in the fall of 1942. “The Great Patriotic War,” as World War II is known in Russia, plays an outsize role in the country’s political mythmaking. Credit... Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
Mr. Putin brought a measure of that comfort to Russia in the first eight years of his presidency. The economy galloped ahead, foreign investment poured in. “It was perhaps the happiest time in the country’s life, with a measure of prosperity and level of freedom never matched in Russian history,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Mr. Gabuev, who, like thousands of liberal Russians, has fled to Istanbul since the war in Ukraine began, added that “there was a lot of corruption and concentration of wealth, but also lots of boats rising. And remember, in the 1990s, everyone had been poor as a church mouse.” Now the middle class could vacation in Turkey or Vietnam.
The problem for Mr. Putin was that to diversify an economy, the rule of law helps. He had studied law at St. Petersburg University and claimed to respect it. In fact, power proved to be his lodestone. He held legal niceties in contempt. “Why would he share power when he could live off oil, gas, other natural resources, and enough redistribution to keep people happy?” Mr. Gabuev said.
Timothy Snyder, the prominent historian of fascism, put it this way: “Having toyed with an authoritarian rule-of-law state, he simply become the oligarch-in-chief and turned the state into the enforcer mechanism of his oligarchical clan.”
Still, the biggest country on earth, stretching across 11 time zones, needed more than economic recovery to stand tall once more. Mr. Putin had been formed in a Soviet world that held that Russia was not a great power unless it dominated its neighbors. Rumblings at the country’s doorstep challenged that doctrine.
In November 2003, the Rose Revolution in Georgia set that country firmly on a Western course. In 2004 — the year of NATO’s second post-Cold War expansion, which brought in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia — massive street protests, known as the Orange Revolution, erupted in Ukraine. They, too, stemmed from a rejection of Moscow and the embrace of a Western future.
Mr. Putin brought a measure of that comfort to Russia in the first eight years of his presidency. The economy galloped ahead, foreign investment poured in. “It was perhaps the happiest time in the country’s life, with a measure of prosperity and level of freedom never matched in Russian history,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Mr. Gabuev, who, like thousands of liberal Russians, has fled to Istanbul since the war in Ukraine began, added that “there was a lot of corruption and concentration of wealth, but also lots of boats rising. And remember, in the 1990s, everyone had been poor as a church mouse.” Now the middle class could vacation in Turkey or Vietnam.
The problem for Mr. Putin was that to diversify an economy, the rule of law helps. He had studied law at St. Petersburg University and claimed to respect it. In fact, power proved to be his lodestone. He held legal niceties in contempt. “Why would he share power when he could live off oil, gas, other natural resources, and enough redistribution to keep people happy?” Mr. Gabuev said.
Timothy Snyder, the prominent historian of fascism, put it this way: “Having toyed with an authoritarian rule-of-law state, he simply become the oligarch-in-chief and turned the state into the enforcer mechanism of his oligarchical clan.”
Still, the biggest country on earth, stretching across 11 time zones, needed more than economic recovery to stand tall once more. Mr. Putin had been formed in a Soviet world that held that Russia was not a great power unless it dominated its neighbors. Rumblings at the country’s doorstep challenged that doctrine.
In November 2003, the Rose Revolution in Georgia set that country firmly on a Western course. In 2004 — the year of NATO’s second post-Cold War expansion, which brought in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia — massive street protests, known as the Orange Revolution, erupted in Ukraine. They, too, stemmed from a rejection of Moscow and the embrace of a Western future.
Ukrainian police officers guarded the Parliament building in Kyiv, the capital, during the Orange Revolution protests of 2004.Credit...Sergey Supinski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Putin’s turn from cooperation with the West to confrontation began. It would be slow but the general direction was set. Once, asked by Ms. Merkel what his greatest mistake had been, the Russian president replied: “To trust you.”
A Clash With the West
From 2004 onward, a distinct hardening of Mr. Putin’s Russia — what Ms. Rice, the former secretary of state, called “a crackdown where they were starting to spin these tales of vulnerability and democratic contagion” — became evident.
The president scrapped elections for regional governors in late 2004, turning them into Kremlin appointees. Russian TV increasingly looked like Soviet TV in its undiluted propaganda.
In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist critical of rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered in Moscow on Mr. Putin’s birthday. Another Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence agent, who had dubbed Russia “a mafia state,” was killed in London, poisoned with a radioactive substance by Russian spies.
Mr. Putin’s turn from cooperation with the West to confrontation began. It would be slow but the general direction was set. Once, asked by Ms. Merkel what his greatest mistake had been, the Russian president replied: “To trust you.”
A Clash With the West
From 2004 onward, a distinct hardening of Mr. Putin’s Russia — what Ms. Rice, the former secretary of state, called “a crackdown where they were starting to spin these tales of vulnerability and democratic contagion” — became evident.
The president scrapped elections for regional governors in late 2004, turning them into Kremlin appointees. Russian TV increasingly looked like Soviet TV in its undiluted propaganda.
In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist critical of rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered in Moscow on Mr. Putin’s birthday. Another Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence agent, who had dubbed Russia “a mafia state,” was killed in London, poisoned with a radioactive substance by Russian spies.
A memorial service in 2007 commemorating the first anniversary of the slaying of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.Credit...Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
The funeral for Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence agent poisoned by Russian spies, in London in 2006.Credit...Cathal McNaughton/Reuters
For Mr. Putin, NATO expansion into countries that had been part of the Soviet Union or its postwar East European imperium represented an American betrayal. But the threat of a successful Western democracy on his doorstep appears to have evolved into a more immediate perceived threat to his increasingly repressive system.
“Putin’s nightmare is not NATO, but democracy,” said Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister who met with Mr. Putin several times. “It’s the color revolutions, thousands of people on the streets of Kyiv. Once he embraced an imperial, military ideology as the foundation of Russia as a world power, he was unable to tolerate this.”
Although Mr. Putin has portrayed a West-leaning Ukraine as a threat to Russian security, it was more immediately a threat to Putin’s authoritarian system itself. Radek Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said: “Putin is of course right that a democratic Ukraine integrated with Europe and successful is a mortal threat to Putinism. That, more than NATO membership, is the issue.”
The Russian president does not take well to mortal threats, real or imagined. If anyone had doubted Mr. Putin’s ruthlessness, they stood corrected by 2006. His loathing of weakness dictated a proclivity for violence. Yet Western democracies were slow to absorb this basic lesson.
They needed Russia, and not only for its oil and gas. The Russian president, who was the first to call President Bush after 9/11, was an important potential ally in what came to be called the Global War on Terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity.
For Mr. Putin, NATO expansion into countries that had been part of the Soviet Union or its postwar East European imperium represented an American betrayal. But the threat of a successful Western democracy on his doorstep appears to have evolved into a more immediate perceived threat to his increasingly repressive system.
“Putin’s nightmare is not NATO, but democracy,” said Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister who met with Mr. Putin several times. “It’s the color revolutions, thousands of people on the streets of Kyiv. Once he embraced an imperial, military ideology as the foundation of Russia as a world power, he was unable to tolerate this.”
Although Mr. Putin has portrayed a West-leaning Ukraine as a threat to Russian security, it was more immediately a threat to Putin’s authoritarian system itself. Radek Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said: “Putin is of course right that a democratic Ukraine integrated with Europe and successful is a mortal threat to Putinism. That, more than NATO membership, is the issue.”
The Russian president does not take well to mortal threats, real or imagined. If anyone had doubted Mr. Putin’s ruthlessness, they stood corrected by 2006. His loathing of weakness dictated a proclivity for violence. Yet Western democracies were slow to absorb this basic lesson.
They needed Russia, and not only for its oil and gas. The Russian president, who was the first to call President Bush after 9/11, was an important potential ally in what came to be called the Global War on Terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity.
Mr. Putin with President George W. Bush in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in June 2001. At left is Condoleezza Rice, then Mr. Bush’s national security adviser. Credit...Larry Downing/Reuters
But Mr. Putin was far less comfortable with Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” announced in his second inaugural of January 2005, a commitment to promote democracy across the world in pursuit of a neoconservative vision. In every stirring for liberty, Mr. Putin now saw the hidden hand of the United States. And why would Mr. Bush not include Russia in his ambitious program?
Arriving in Moscow as the U.S. ambassador in 2005, William Burns, now the C.I.A. director, sent a sober cable, all post-Cold War optimism dispelled. “Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into a ‘Europe whole and free,’” he wrote. As he relates in his memoir, “The Back Channel,” Mr. Burns added that Russian “interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role” would “sometimes cause significant problems.”
When François Hollande, the former French president, met Mr. Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as “Yankees” — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had “humiliated us, put us in second position,” Mr. Putin told him. NATO was an organization “aggressive by its nature,” used by the United States to put Russia under pressure, even to stir democracy movements.
“He expressed himself in a cold and calculating way,” Mr. Hollande said. “He is a man who always wants to demonstrate a kind of implacable determination, but also in the form of seduction, almost gentleness. An agreeable tone alternates with brutal outbursts, which are thereby made more effective.”
But Mr. Putin was far less comfortable with Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” announced in his second inaugural of January 2005, a commitment to promote democracy across the world in pursuit of a neoconservative vision. In every stirring for liberty, Mr. Putin now saw the hidden hand of the United States. And why would Mr. Bush not include Russia in his ambitious program?
Arriving in Moscow as the U.S. ambassador in 2005, William Burns, now the C.I.A. director, sent a sober cable, all post-Cold War optimism dispelled. “Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into a ‘Europe whole and free,’” he wrote. As he relates in his memoir, “The Back Channel,” Mr. Burns added that Russian “interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role” would “sometimes cause significant problems.”
When François Hollande, the former French president, met Mr. Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as “Yankees” — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had “humiliated us, put us in second position,” Mr. Putin told him. NATO was an organization “aggressive by its nature,” used by the United States to put Russia under pressure, even to stir democracy movements.
“He expressed himself in a cold and calculating way,” Mr. Hollande said. “He is a man who always wants to demonstrate a kind of implacable determination, but also in the form of seduction, almost gentleness. An agreeable tone alternates with brutal outbursts, which are thereby made more effective.”
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