Vlad Intentions

[Editor’s note: Read the first half of this profile here.]

It is Dec. 31, 1999. Around the world many are filled with foreboding. Some of it is millennial religious fear, the kind once danceably expressed by Prince. Some of the fear is technological — for months there have been warnings about the Y2K bug that, it is said, will trigger global chaos when two-digit computer calendars flip to Year 00.

Midnight arrives. The Messiah fails to return. The world does not end. Planes do not plummet from the sky. There are fireworks, there is champagne.

But something ominous did happen on Dec. 31, 1999. Then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin had suddenly resigned, to be succeeded by his prime minister. The new president is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. No computer chaos — instead the 21st century was to be inaugurated with a different kind of trouble.

In 2016 I was hired by a local documentary production company and travelled with film crews to London, Germany, Kyiv, Stockholm, New York, Washington state and California. We interviewed people who had gained — and frequently suffered from — the attention of President Putin. Along the way I struggled to get a sense of why so many have been drawn to this ruthless and powerful figure. More recently I have tried to get a sense of what, if anything, has changed since that spring when I sat down with so many of Putin’s adversaries and observers.

I’m not sure quite what I was expecting on my 2016 visit to Kyiv. But the city proved a pleasant surprise. As a former Manitoba kid I was a bit embarrassed to realize that no, the shops were not full of the cabbage rolls and pierogies I had anticipated based on my years among the Ukrainian diaspora. Georgian restaurants were popular though, and Vietnamese too. It is a walkable city and the complete absence of Starbucks had permitted a thriving local coffee culture with small espresso kiosks dotting the streets and plazas. Kyiv, at least the central parts I saw, was full of interesting architecture and golden-domed churches, lacking many of the brutal, drab blocks often found in former Soviet cities.

‘The pain was getting stronger and stronger’

I met Viktor Yushchenko at Kyiv’s House of Writers, a grand old building that has been both a refuge and tribute to the nation’s literary community over the years. There is a poignancy to Yushchenko in such situations. It’s an interview, yes, but Yushchenko knows what the camera wants. He understands its need to glide over his countenance like a space capsule crossing the pockmarked lunar surface. Yushchenko’s ravaged face is part of the story that must be told, and he must endure that.

When Yushchenko first met Vladimir Putin in 2000, neither man yet fully occupied the places history would eventually grant them. Yushchenko was then-prime minister of Ukraine. Putin, mere months into his tenure as president of Russia, was still a complete cypher to the world.

Yushchenko had recently toured a place sacred to Ukrainians — the cemetery at Mount Makivka where in 1915 Ukraine’s Sich Riflemen defeated an overwhelming Russian invasion force. While there Yushchenko had discovered that the nearby graves of Russian soldiers were neglected and overgrown. Now he proposed to Putin that the two countries might co-operate on a refurbishment of the site. “I told him, ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, it could be the first step to mutual understanding,’” Yushchenko recalled. “He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘It is our goal.’”

This much was true — Putin had goals. Four years later Yushchenko would experience the brutal reality of Putin’s prerogatives first-hand. He would survive several assassination attempts, culminating in the near-fatal poisoning that would leave his face a battlefield of pits and scars. There can be little doubt who authorized the attacks.

“The message of the election campaign of 2004,” Yushchenko told me through a translator, “was about what way we would choose: either a European Ukraine or a Russian Ukraine.”

The interference began immediately. “A piece about Yushchenko being dead, even before the election campaign started, either because of an accident, explosions or poisoning, was basically spread in all mass media,” Yushchenko said.

There were several attempts to make those fake news reports prophetic. Yushchenko’s car would subsequently be forced into a ditch by a heavy Russian-made truck, his campaign plane prevented from landing, and a Kyiv campaign office attacked by a car packed with explosives. After repeated urging, Yushchenko at last reluctantly agreed to a meeting with Ukrainian government security services. His reluctance stemmed from his knowledge that the government supported his pro-Russian opponent, Viktor Yanukovych. Toward the end of the dinner meeting Yushchenko was served a dish of rice. After tasting it, he said, “I got a headache, and the pain was getting stronger and stronger.”

He went home to his wife. “We greeted each other with a kiss,” he recalled, “and my wife said that she felt some metallic after-taste.”

Yushchenko was quickly incapacitated. Doctors appeared mystified. Finally a political ally insisted that he be taken to a hospital in Vienna. There he was diagnosed with dioxin poisoning, the levels in his blood 6,000 times above normal. When he finally returned to Ukraine his once-handsome face was swollen and cratered and he could function only with a catheter feeding painkillers into his system. The October election, apparently won by Yanukovych, was so riddled with fraud it inspired the so-called Orange Revolution that saw crowds take to the streets of Ukrainian cities. The election results were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court and in a court-ordered December 2004 run-off Yushchenko was finally declared elected.

Later I would sit down with former U.S. secretary of defense Robert Gates, just down the Interstate 5 from Vancouver in Mount Vernon, Washington. It so happened, Gates told me, that his first encounter with Putin came at an event that also included Yushchenko — the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. In the seating arrangement Putin and Yushchenko were separated only by their host, then-German chancellor Angela Merkel. “So when Merkel gets up to welcome everybody,” Gates recalled, “for all practical purposes Putin and Yushchenko are sitting next to each other. And the look that Yushchenko gave Putin was one of unmitigated hatred. I mean, it was amazing.”

“Yushchenko certainly believes that the KGB tried to poison him, that Putin tried to poison him,” Gates told me. “And I’m inclined to think that that’s probably true.”

‘I saw a stone-cold killer’

Gates was defense secretary under president Bush but was kept on into the Obama administration, no doubt in part for his deep knowledge of Russia that included a PhD in Russian and Soviet history. Gates’ first White House boss would not prove to be quite so insightful. “I looked the man in the eye,” Bush said of Putin in 2001. “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy... I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

“After my first meeting with Putin,” Gates told me, “I came back and reported to president Bush, ‘Well, I looked into Putin’s eyes and I saw a stone-cold killer.’”

Bill Browder came to know Putin’s ruthless streak only too well. I spoke with Browder on an upper floor of London’s Tate Modern gallery, overlooking the Millennium Bridge and St Paul’s beyond. Browder, whose grandfather Earl had twice run for U.S. president as head of the Communist Party, launched Hermitage Capital Management in 1996, intent on investing in the new Russia. For investors, '90s Russia was the Wild East. “There was democracy, there was a free press,” Browder recalled, “and there was total, unregulated capitalism.”

Of course that also meant unrestrained corruption. Browder and Hermitage set out to expose theft and sleaze in companies like Gazprom, challenging oligarchs who had gained incredible wealth in the post-Soviet era. That made Browder, for a while, an unofficial ally of Putin, who also wanted to rein in the oligarchs.

All that changed in 2004 when Putin tried and imprisoned Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Frightened, the oligarchs came to heel (probably, Browder believes, agreeing to kick back huge sums to the president and his cronies). Now Putin no longer needed Browder. He was detained, then expelled from the country.

A later police raid on the offices of Hermitage led to an attempt by government security officials to steal $230 million in tax payments. To investigate, the company hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky. “He was 35-years-old, he worked for an American law firm, and we asked him to investigate the crime,” Browder said. “Sergei exposed that crime, testified against the officials involved, and roughly a month later, Nov. 24, 2008, the same officials came to his home and arrested him.”

A year later, and by then seriously ill, Magnitsky was beaten to death in prison by riot guards.

Since then Browder has been on a crusade. He described his experiences in the book Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice. Browder helped create the Magnitsky Act, which Boris Nemtsov himself lobbied for before his death. The Magnitsky Act (which has a Canadian version as well) allows the U.S. government to sanction, freeze the assets of and bar entry to those suspected of human rights abuses including the death of Magnitsky. “I have a list of 282 people I blame — 282 people who were involved in the crime that Sergei uncovered, in his false arrest, in his torture and detention, in the coverup after his death. At the top of that list is Vladimir Putin.”

At the time Browder and I spoke, Putin had already annexed Crimea and backed the brutal military crackdown of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Two years earlier Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine had also shot down Malaysian Air Flight 17, killing 298. “He’s created massive amounts of suffering in Ukraine,” Browder told me in 2016, “and he’s now creating massive amounts of suffering in Syria. And it has no impact on him. He just looks at all the different pieces on the chessboard and says, ‘What can I move here, what can I move there?’ He’s not constrained by morality or law.”

But secretary Gates believed that Putin, while admittedly amoral, was a rational actor. “I think he knows how to keep things from going too far,” he told me. “Particularly with respect to the West, he knows when to pull back.”

‘He doesn’t look at the long-term impact’

In 2022 that no longer seems to be the case. Putin is rampant. Has he changed? Some observers believe he has gone over the edge — this week jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny referred to him as “an insane czar.” Could it be that the natural entropy of dictatorship has set in?

In yesterday’s piece I related what author and Putin expert Masha Gessen told me about the man back in 2016: “It’s scary to contemplate that Putin is that dependent on a couple of people to either deliver information to him or shield him from information, but that’s exactly how it works. He doesn’t use the internet; he doesn’t actually have a computer that he uses for work. He reads things on paper. The briefings are delivered to him. He is entirely sealed from the outside world.”

When a leader exists in such a bubble, isn’t it inevitable that he will gradually drift further out of touch with reality?

Leon Panetta, who in addition to his time as CIA director was also former president Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and in 2011 took over from Gates as Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, agreed that Putin is no madman. “I still think this guy is smart enough to understand that there’s a better way to get things done,” he told me six years ago.

But Panetta also described Putin in ways that suggest the Russian leader may not really have changed since we spoke. “I think his biggest problem is he doesn’t look at the long-term impact of what he’s doing,” Panetta mused. “He sees an opening, he decides to move. He believes that by asserting power he can control ultimately what happens. He’s a short-term opportunist but he isn’t thinking about where this is all headed. I think he’s engaged in a mission that is not going to have a good outcome.”

I conducted these interviews in 2016. How much has Putin changed since? A little, I’d say, but not much. If anything he has simply leaned further in the direction he was already inclined.

More drastic have been the changes elsewhere. When I had these conversations Barack Obama was still president of the United States and there was every expectation his former secretary of state Hillary Clinton would succeed him. Instead the Oval Office was captured by a man who saw and continues to see Vladimir Putin as a role model.

Since then Donald Trump’s ongoing domination of Republican politics has created a safe space for fellow Putin sycophants like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Steve Bannon and Nicholas Fuentes. Under Trump’s wing they have nurtured a culture of American authoritarianism. Perhaps it was there all along, but now it is out and proud. The biggest change since 2016 has been the change of political climate that has allowed Putin to thrive and pursue his goals.

Trump at least has lost direct authority. And Putin? “If he continues to assert himself and Russian power the way he does,” Panetta concluded then, “I think he will fall into that chapter of dictators who make the wrong decisions for their country.”

That prophecy appears well on the way to being realized.

Read ‘Vlad Instincts,’ the first half of this profile, here.