Strongman, The

freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, and property rights, those fundamental elements of a civilised society.’
    The freedoms and rights he praised were precisely those that had been obliterated in the communist USSR and then restored under Yeltsin. And yet within a few years Putin would stand accused of flouting them himself, creating a new kind of post-communist authoritarian model, trampling on the free press, and persecuting business tycoons – or indeed anyone – who dared to challenge him.
    Why did that happen? The key, or at least one of the keys, to understanding Putin’s journey is to look at the Russia he inherited from Yeltsin – a Russia not just economically and militarily weak, but also patronised by the West.
    Yeltsin and Clinton
    Bill Clinton made his last visit to Russia as American president in June 2000, just two months after Putin’s inauguration. Clinton had met Boris Yeltsin some 20 times and built up a close, bantering relationship that came to be described as the ‘Bill ’n’ Boris Show’. He had also met Putin a couple of times, but like most Western leaders still knew little about him other than his prowess at judo and his past career as a KGB agent – and that was enough to make him wary. Now he found Putin a tough negotiator, who, irritatingly, already regarded Clinton as a lame-duck president with little more than half a year left in office.
    Standing a good six inches shorter than the imposing American president, Putin made up for his lack of stature as any judo player does – with agility and skill. He doggedly resisted American plans to abandon (or even amend) the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty so as to allow the US to develop a national missile defence programme – the ‘Star Wars’ system first promoted by Ronald Reagan. The ABM treaty banned both Russia and the United States from deploying defences against nuclear missiles, and for Putin it was a cornerstone of nuclear deterrence: if one side was allowed to develop systems that could shoot down the other’s long-range missiles then the delicate balance of power would be destroyed and the side with the shield might be tempted to launch a pre-emptive strike.
    Putin dismissed Clinton’s criticisms of the brutal new campaign he was waging in Chechnya and his crackdown against NTV, Russia’s leading independent television station. And he revealed his enduring resentment of NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 – an event that would inform Putin’s foreign-policy thinking throughout the next ten years.
    The campaign against Serbia, which was designed to put an end to President Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, was a pivotal moment in Russia’s relations with the West. Throughout the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Moscow supported Milosevic, at least partly because of traditional Russian affinity with the Serbs, who, like Russians, are Orthodox Christian Slavs.
    The ‘brotherly ties’ between Russians and Serbs may be exaggerated, but the Kremlin certainly saw parallels between Milosevic’s attempts to subdue ‘terrorism’ and separatism in Kosovo and Yeltsin’s fight against the same problems in Chechnya. Just as Yeltsin branded the Chechen rebels ‘bandits’, so Milosevic (and indeed at one point the US government) regarded the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist group. Having launched a bloody war against Chechnya, causing tens of thousands of deaths and a mass exodus of refugees, it was entirely consistent for the Russians to support Milosevic in his efforts to maintain the integrity of what remained of Yugoslavia.
    But Yeltsin’s pleas not to attack Serbia went unheeded, leaving Moscow feeling that for all the bonhomie of the Bill ’n’ Boris Show, and for all the talk of welcoming post-communist Russia into the community of civilised nations, its word counted for nothing. On the eve of NATO’s air strikes on Belgrade, Yeltsin would explode with anger during telephone calls with Clinton and sometimes slam down the phone. 1
    Yeltsin’s prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, was flying to Washington on 23 March 1999. He had talks planned with President Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore and the International Monetary Fund. His mission was to secure multi-billion-dollar loans to help stabilise the Russian economy, still reeling from the financial collapse of August 1998. According to Primakov’s assistant, Konstantin Kosachev, the prime minister called Gore during a