The New Tsar (47 page)

For Putin, the stakes in Ukraine were much higher. Georgia was a rump state that posed no major threat to Moscow’s influence. Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No one then—and certainly not Putin when he honeymooned there nearly two decades later—ever envisioned that Ukraine and with it Crimea would one day be part of another, independent nation. Even now, in 2004, it seemed a historical accident that Putin, like most Russians, would tolerate only as long as the new Ukraine remained firmly nestled in Russia’s geopolitical embrace.

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I
n July 2004, three months before Ukraine’s presidential election, Putin flew to Crimea to meet with Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych, who had been Kuchma’s prime minister since 2002, when he replaced the man now running as the main opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. Despite reservations from Putin, who did not consider him the best candidate,
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Kuchma had tapped Yanukovych as his political heir. Their meeting with Putin that July took place in Yalta—in the same building, the Livadia Palace, where the victors of the Great Patriotic War had divided the spoils of a soon-to-be liberated Europe. Putin, too, had “spheres of influence” in mind that summer, and as far as he was concerned, Ukraine remained within Russia’s.

Putin pressed Kuchma to end his government’s flirtation with the European Union and NATO. The latter was now particularly reviled in Russia as it crept further and further eastward. Only months before, in March, NATO had expanded its member nations from nineteen to twenty-six, admitting not only Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Romania in eastern Europe but the three former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, each of which was home to a sizable population of Russians. Most American and European officials accepted as an article of faith that NATO’s expansion would strengthen the security of the continent by forging a defensive collective of democracies, just as the European Union had buried many of the nationalistic urges that had caused so much conflict in previous centuries. Putin had grudgingly accepted NATO’s plans to expand, but now NATO seemed to loom over Ukraine. Like many in Russia’s security establishment, he had been trained to subvert and, if necessary, fight NATO, and a sense of enmity lingered. Officials often cited reassurances that Mikhail Gorbachev believed he had been given during the reunification of Germany after 1989 that NATO would not expand to the east (though leaders of the United States and Europe insisted that no such reassurance had ever been made). It was humiliating enough that the Baltic nations had joined NATO, but influential American and European officials were now openly advocating the inclusion of still more former Soviet republics, including Georgia and Ukraine. “The presence of American soldiers on our border has created a kind of paranoia in Russia,” Putin’s new foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, acknowledged in April 2004 when the ceremonial raising of the flags of the new member states took place outside the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. There were in fact no Americans
deployed to the Baltic states, merely a rotating squadron of European fighter jets to patrol the skies over the new territories, but it seemed to Putin as if the enemy had reached the gates. They had to be stopped, and Putin drew the line at Ukraine.

In Yalta, he and Kuchma discussed the integration of a proposed Common Economic Space, a loose economic alliance between Russia and Ukraine, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, that over the years would take shape as a more formal customs union and finally an economic and political bloc intended to rival the European Union. Putin had floated the idea the year before, but now he wanted Kuchma’s explicit public support for it. This meant reversing a formal strategy that Kuchma’s government had published a month before calling for Ukraine to pursue membership in the European Union and NATO. Needing Russia’s support in what was shaping up as a close election for his successors, one that could provide a tainted president with security after he left office, Kuchma succumbed to Putin’s pressure. After their meeting, he announced that he had abandoned the strategy he had just announced and would only seek cordial relations with the alliances that dominated Europe—an abrupt reversal that stunned Ukraine’s opposition.

Behind closed doors, Putin and Kuchma also struck a side deal: they created a new energy trading company.
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It went by the unwieldy acronym RosUkrEnergo, and its ownership remained deliberately vague. Half was owned by a branch of Gazprom, the gas monopoly in Russia that had increasingly become part of Putin’s vision of a greater Russia, controlled by the Kremlin and led by his closest allies from Petersburg. The other half was owned by a shadowy company whose partners remained secret, their share managed by an Austrian bank, Raiffeisen International. The new company was registered neither in Russia nor in Ukraine, but rather in Switzerland.
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This murky deal underscored how Putin’s concern about Ukraine’s looming election extended far beyond politics alone, and how much financial concerns figured in most of his calculations.

Natural gas, even more than oil, had become Russia’s most powerful tool in foreign policy. Oil trades freely, sloshing through the world’s economy; gas requires fixed pipelines, linking the nations of Europe to Russia. The network of pipelines, dating to the Soviet era, gave Russia clout and, with rising energy prices, the prospect of the wealth that Putin nearly a decade before had argued in his dissertation was the core of the state’s power. Ukraine, through which most of Russia’s gas passed, represented a potential chokehold on Putin’s ambitions. Putin was certain that
he now faced a concerted effort to thwart his plans. When he appeared at Livadia Palace following his private talks with Kuchma and Yanukovych, Putin even used a KGB term for networks of agents and informants betraying the state on behalf of the countries trying to destroy it:
agentura
. “The
agentura
, both inside our countries and outside, are trying everything possible to compromise the integration between Russia and Ukraine,” he said.
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“L
ook at my face,” Viktor Yushchenko declared when he returned to Kyiv on September 21 from treatment in the Austrian hospital. The source of his poisoning, even the fact of it, was not yet clear, but he went directly to the Ukrainian parliament, the Supreme Rada, to accuse unnamed enemies of trying to stop his candidacy. His appearance was sensational. Yushchenko, a central banker who helped create the country’s new currency, the hyrvna, had served as Kuchma’s prime minister for two years before he was ousted by those opposed to his westernizing vision for Ukraine’s future. He strongly supported the European Union and NATO. The fact that his wife was a Ukrainian-American from the diaspora in Chicago only confirmed the worst to his critics, including Kuchma, who was heard in the secret recordings coarsely ranting that she was an operative of the CIA.
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(He also had them both followed.) Now Yushchenko stood at the Rada’s dais and accused Kuchma’s allies of conspiring to murder him. “What happened to me was not caused by food or my diet, but by the political regime in this country. Friends, we are not talking today about food literally, we are talking about the Ukrainian political kitchen where murders are on the menu.”
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Hidden under his suit, he had a catheter in his spine, pulsing sedatives to ease the pain he was experiencing. Four days later he flew back to Vienna for further treatment.

Yushchenko was not a charismatic politician, but his campaign was well funded and astute. It had chosen a simple message—
Tak
, or Yes—and adopted the color orange, plastering the city with flags, banners, and ads. He also forged an alliance with Yulia Tymoshenko, a formidable nationalist and energy tycoon who had manipulated the collapsing Soviet system to enrich herself as Mikhail Khodorkovsky had in Russia. Her ambition was astounding and, as a woman in a political milieu dominated by men, she unabashedly used her attractiveness as a political prop, braiding her hair in a trademark peasant’s rope. With Yushchenko sidelined for treatment, she carried the campaign for him, delivering
blistering denunciations of Kuchma’s rule and the prospect that Yanukovych would simply steer the country ever closer to Russia.

As the election neared, Yushchenko’s campaign gained momentum. The intelligence reports that reached Putin each morning must have confirmed his worst fears of Western nefariousness, detailing an elaborate plan to encircle Russia. What was happening in Ukraine must be a prelude to a final push into Russia itself. This plot owed much to the febrile imagination of Russia’s intelligence services, but the United States, Germany, and other European nations fed the fever by supplying money to organizations in Ukraine that promoted democracy, civil society, legal reform, and environmentalism. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, these nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had operated throughout Eastern Europe, even in Russia, with the aim of assisting newly independent nations to make the transition from one-party systems to open, multiparty democracies. In Serbia in 2000, then in Georgia in 2003, they had provided support to peaceful political protests that ultimately overthrew sclerotic governments. Though their funding was modest, rarely more than a few million dollars or euros each, they represented the
agentura
that Putin feared.

Russian businesses, under pressure from the Kremlin, countered with pledges of cash for Yanukovych at the same meeting in Yalta. Roughly half of the $600 million that Yanukovych’s team was believed to have spent—the equivalent of 1 percent of the country’s GDP—came from Russia.
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Signaling the depth of his personal involvement, Putin put his own chief of staff, Dmitri Medvedev, in charge of the Kremlin’s political operation in Ukraine. Medvedev, who had run Sobchak’s and Putin’s campaigns in the past, dispatched trusted advisers, including Gleb Pavlovsky and Sergei Markov, to Ukraine. In August, the Kremlin’s political operatives opened a space called “Russia House” in a central hotel in Kyiv, ostensibly to promote good will between Russia and Ukraine, but in reality to run the Kremlin’s campaign on Yanukovych’s behalf. They orchestrated the same sort of operation that characterized Russia’s elections: uncritical coverage on state television of set-piece rallies for Yanukovych and vicious attacks on Yushchenko as an agent of the West. A cache of posters produced by Yanukovych’s advisers showed Yushchenko’s orange slogan under a picture of President Bush riding Ukraine like a cowboy. Yanukovych’s wife, Lyudmila, ranted at a rally in Donetsk that the Americans provided Yushchenko’s supporters with felt boots and
oranges laced with narcotics—remarks that were promptly remixed into a pop song that provided a sound track for the upheaval to come.

Putin, for his part, injected himself directly into the campaign, meeting with Kuchma and Yanukovych repeatedly. On the eve of the first round of voting on October 31, he traveled to Kyiv for a state visit that ostensibly celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s liberation of Ukraine from the Nazis in 1944. The night before the parade he even appeared during prime time on three state television channels for a call-in interview, in which he affected magnanimity and concern for the issues facing Ukrainians. He nodded to Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty, but also made it clear that a historical mistake had separated the two brotherly nations from their natural alliance.
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Several of the questions, which were sent in by email or fax or called in live, lamented the demise of the Soviet Union. One questioner asked Putin to run for president of Ukraine. Putin demurred. It was impossible to rebuild the Soviet Union, he said, but Ukraine’s future lay in tightening its economic ties to Russia. He never mentioned Yushchenko, but five times he praised Yanukovych’s stewardship as prime minister. Putin, by now used to these formats at home, exuded charm and humility. The announcer exclaimed that there were six hundred calls a minute coming in on the phone lines. Putin recited—in Ukrainian—a fragment of a poem by Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, although he had to admit that while he understood some Ukrainian, he did not speak it. A schoolboy named Andrei wanted to know if he could be photographed with him—“Vladimir Vladimirovich, do you believe in dreams?” he began—and the next day, Putin obliged, appearing with little Andrei in Kuchma’s office and presenting him a laptop as a gift. During the military parade Putin stood beside Kuchma and Yanukovych on the viewing stand as thousands of soldiers goose-stepped past wearing vintage uniforms and standards of the Red Army. (At one point, Yanukovych tried to hand Putin a stick of chewing gum, prompting a look of astonished disgust at his coarse manners.)
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