Negotiating the New START Treaty by Rose Gottemoeller;

Author:Rose Gottemoeller; [Gottemoeller, Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambria Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Putin Ups the Ante

Once all the cables were out the door, I finally got on a plane to fly back to the United States, only to encounter the first of two enormous snowfalls in Washington, DC, that winter. The runways were plowed at Dulles Airport, but the gate areas were not, so we waited for a couple of hours to disembark. By the time I finally arrived at home, I was glassy-eyed. It was December 22.

The holiday week passed quietly, but on December 29, before I went to bed, I checked with my research assistant about what the Russian press was looking like. Olga, a native Russian speaker, was a graduate student at Georgetown University, and she had been sending me a “press take” every day from the Russian-language media. This had been vital because it helped me keep up on the internal politics and interagency dynamics in Moscow.

On this occasion, she had alarming news. Prime Minister Putin had been out in the Russian Far East that day to open a pipeline and take part in some other events. In a tough speech before a youth group in Vladivostok, he had ripped into the START follow-on negotiations, claiming that the treaty being worked was weak and inadequate because it did not constrain U.S. missile defenses. TASS and InterFax, the Russian press agencies, reported the speech prominently on their news wires.

When I read the reports, I was jolted. That’s the end of the negotiations, I said to myself, and asked Olga to do a compilation overnight of what I assumed would be a wave of negative stories out of Moscow the next day. Then I went straight to bed, overwhelmed by fatigue and disappointment.

The next morning, I was wide awake at 5:00 a.m. and opened up the message from Olga with dread, expecting the worst. To my surprise, she told me that there were no further stories about Putin’s speech in Vladivostok. Quite the opposite, she said: when she checked the TASS and InterFax websites in the middle of the night Washington time, where the original reports had been, there was only the notation, “This story has been taken down.”

I was amazed. Someone had decided to stand up to Prime Minister Putin and insist that he not blow up the negotiations. I can only assume that that person must have been then president of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev. I know that there is general skepticism that President Medvedev ever defied Prime Minister Putin during his time in the presidency. I am convinced, however, that he did so on this occasion.

Immediately I called and reached Antonov on his mobile in Moscow. He was properly circumspect on the phone, but he readily agreed with me that we had to move swiftly to nail down the schedule for the next Mullen-Makarov meeting, this time in Moscow. I suggested early January, but he said that the Russian delegation could not possibly be ready before the third week in January—this was understandable both because they

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