Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

The next act in this tit-for-tat round of sanctions was the US closure of the Russian consulate in San Francisco. Perched high on top of a hill with a direct line of sight to the ocean, the building was in the vicinity of Silicon Valley, educational institutions such as Stanford and Berkeley, and a large number of defense contractors and researchers—including two Department of Energy–affiliated nuclear weapons laboratories. US officials had long suspected that the consulate was a focal point for Russian espionage efforts in the United States. Indeed, in the forty-eight hours between the announcement and its actual closure, clouds of black smoke wheezed from the consulate’s chimney, presumably because its employees were burning as many documents as possible before they had to evacuate the building. 59The United States also closed the Russian consulate in Seattle. The Russians retaliated by closing the US consulate in Saint Petersburg.

This pattern—Trump consistently praising Russia while his administration imposed more sanctions on Russia—became more noticeable well into his second year in office. The contrast between Trump and the rest of the executive branch was very much on display as Putin entered his fourth term in the Kremlin. The day before Rex Tillerson was fired by a tweet from the president while Tillerson was in Africa, he criticized Russia more harshly than previously. The United Kingdom had just directly implicated the Kremlin in the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Tillerson called the Kremlin “an irresponsible force of instability in the world” and expressed solidarity with the British government. 60Days later, President Trump phoned Putin to congratulate him on his reelection, against the explicit advice of his national security team. “We had a very good call,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We will probably be meeting in the not too distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control.” 61The Kremlin concurred: “On the whole, the conversation was constructive and businesslike, with a focus on overcoming the accumulated problems in Russian-American relations.” 62

The next round of sanctions, issued by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), came in April. These were directed against seven oligarchs with ties to Putin along with twelve companies they own or control. Sanctions were also imposed on seventeen senior government officials and the state-owned Russian weapons trading company Rosoboronexport, which has longstanding ties to Syria, and its subsidiary Russian Financial Corporation Bank. The White House said these targeted sanctions would help to ensure that Russian oligarchs profiting from the Kremlin’s destabilizing activities, including its interference in the 2016 elections, would face consequences for their actions. One oligarch was particularly notable: Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum magnate who had in the past worked with Paul Manafort. As a result of the sanctions, Deripaska’s firm Rusal was unable to service its dollar-denominated debt, and its economic difficulties impacted the global aluminum industry. In the end, OFAC had to extend the deadline for dealing with Rusal’s creditors, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that sanctions against Rusal would be reassessed. All of those sanctioned can no longer obtain visas to come to the United States, and any assets they have in the US are frozen.

In June, the Treasury Department imposed a fresh round of sanctions on Russia, this time targeting five Russian companies and three individuals, some of whom are accused of directly supporting Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the FSB. Mnuchin explained, “The United States is engaged in an ongoing effort to counter malicious actors working at the behest of the Russian Federation and its military and intelligence units to increase Russia’s offensive cyber capabilities.” 63Congress has signaled that new sanctions are forthcoming in response to continued Russian election interference, including hacking into its members’ computers.

On July 13, 2018, three days before Trump met Putin in Helsinki for a summit, Mueller handed down indictments on twelve GRU agents “engaged in cyber operations that involved the staged release of documents stolen through computer intrusions. These units conducted large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election.” 64The US intelligence community had, once again, spoken clearly about Russia election interference. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had discussed the indictments with Trump before he left for Europe, and Trump had agreed that these charges could be made public before his meeting with Putin. 65Yet three days later Trump stood next to Putin in Helsinki and said, “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” 66

How did Trump persuade his skeptical advisers that he should have a bilateral summit with Putin? By the spring of 2018, his growing self-confidence—especially following his unprecedented meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore—led him to abruptly fire both Tillerson and McMaster, whom he deemed insufficiently loyal. In their places, he appointed CIA director Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security adviser. Both of these men were known to have hard-line views on Russia, but they were Trump supporters who were committed to implementing the president’s policies. Bolton, who in 2017 had described Russian election interference as an “act of war,” in July 2018 described the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt.” 68

The hastily prepared meeting came at the end of a tumultuous trip to the NATO summit in Brussels and to the United Kingdom. In Brussels, Trump disparaged NATO allies and called into question the United States’ commitment to collective self-defense. In the UK, he criticized Prime Minister Theresa May and expressed support for her rival Boris Johnson. But in the presence of Vladimir Putin, he was cordial and deferential. Putin and Trump appear to share a similar worldview, criticizing alliances that limit a major power’s freedom of action, supporting the idea of absolute sovereignty, and rejecting the liberal international order in favor of muscular nationalism.

The two presidents held a ninety-minute meeting at which only their interpreters were present—very unusual for such high-level sessions. Hence there is no official record of what was discussed. Although the Russians subsequently released information about a variety of agreements they claimed Trump and Putin had reached, the US side furnished no details on the presidential tête-à-tête. Subsequent interviews with Pompeo and Bolton raised questions about how much either knew about what was discussed. Bolton claimed the meeting had no agenda and was just designed to be an “exchange of views.” 69By contrast, in the days following the summit, Russia claimed there had been agreement on four issues: the establishment of a council of experts to promote “points of contact” between the two countries; the creation of a US-Russia business forum to promote commercial ties; the reestablishment of a counterterrorism working group; and the creation of a cybersecurity working group. 70

Putin began the Helsinki press conference self-confidently, saying he and Trump had had a “good conversation” and had discussed disarmament, the INF Treaty, strategic stability, counterterrorism, Syria, Ukraine, Iran, and North Korea. Trump, blaming both the US and Russia for the bad state of relations, mentioned few details of what had been discussed. He called Putin “a good competitor.” During the question-and-answer session, Putin was asked whether he had wanted Trump to win the election. “Yes,” he replied. “Yes, I wanted him to win.” Trump talked at length about his doubts about his own intelligence community’s investigations into Russian meddling and collusion. 71The worst fears of US allies—namely that Trump would say Crimea belonged to Russia or that the US might leave NATO—did not materialize. Indeed, Putin explicitly said that Trump believed that the Crimea referendum was illegal. But the specter of Putin acting as if he were in charge and Trump questioning his own intelligence officials made a strong impression on both the Russian and the American side.