Mr. Putin by Hill Fiona;Gaddy Clifford G.;Brookings Institution;

Author:Hill, Fiona;Gaddy, Clifford G.;Brookings Institution;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

A NARROW AMERICAN VANTAGE POINT

Beyond Henry Kissinger, Putin has had few representative Americans to fall back on if he wants insights into how the United States political system works and how Americans and their leaders think. As president, Putin has tended to focus on gleaning information from his official interactions with U.S. leaders—a set of usually formal encounters that he ceded almost entirely to Dmitry Medvedev in 2008–12—and presumably from the various reports produced for him by the Russian intelligence agencies, government ministries, and the presidential administration. In the Kremlin, for most of the 2000s and the early phases of Putin's presidency, these reports were produced by staff reporting to senior presidential aide Sergei Prikhodko and his deputy, Alexander Manzhosin.34 Although they spoke English, to our knowledge neither Prikhodko nor Manzhosin had any experience of living or working in the United States. They were nonetheless in charge of overseeing critical aspects of relations between Moscow and Washington, D.C.35 Otherwise, Putin's “go-to guys” for the United States within the Russian government and the Kremlin have been Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister and former representative to the UN in New York, who speaks fluent English, and Yury Ushakov, a personal presidential adviser and former Russian ambassador to the United States. As in the case of Germany, this offers a very narrow vantage point.

Since the 1990s, only a tiny sliver of Russian and American elites have interacted with each other. Putin's lack of fluency in English has limited his own ability to have direct contacts except through interpreters or others who can act as connectors and conduits. The 1994 transcript from the Körber Stiftung's roundtable in St. Petersburg underscores this point. At that session, Putin was likely the only Russian who could speak directly in German to the German participants. The other Russian participants, like First Deputy Defense Minister Andrei Kokoshin, if they had second-language skills, were mostly English-speaking specialists who started their professional careers in the Soviet Institute on the United States and Canada. Kokoshin might have spoken in Russian with translation into German during this particular roundtable session; but in other meetings he could listen to the Americans in their native language and talk to them and other English speakers informally during breaks. Putin would always have to rely on Germans or translators for his American education.

The biggest concern expressed by everyone in the 1994 Körber roundtable was the future of NATO. Five years later, the issue of NATO and NATO enlargement came to play a significant role in Putin's professional life and in his ascent to the presidency. By 1994, the USSR's military alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, had collapsed along with the rest of the Soviet bloc, but NATO was still going strong. East European countries were knocking on NATO's door seeking new security arrangements. In January 1994 at the NATO summit in Brussels, the alliance began the process of enlargement with the creation of the Partnership for Peace Program (PfP). This was intended to facilitate military and political

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