The Magnitsky Act, Revolution in Ukraine, and a Final Rupture in US-Russian Relations (2012–2015)
This article covers how new US sanctions following the death of Sergei Magnitsky and events surrounding the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine led to a crisis in Russian-American relations. It is the Fourteenth and final entry in the series “Putin’s Russia, Global Corruption, and the Road to the 2016 American Election.” While it is not necessary to read the earlier entries, it is recommended.
The first article provides a brief history of Russia’s intelligence services and a definition of “Disinformation” and “Active Measures.”
The second article describes Vladimir Putin’s early life and his experiences as a KGB Officer in Russia and East Germany.
The third article describes how elements of the KGB laundered billions of dollars of Communist Party money into the West as the USSR collapsed.
The fourth article describes the rise of the post-Soviet oligarchic system and the role Eurasian organized crime played in facilitating it.
The fifth article covers Putin’s tenure as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg and his enduring relationship with organized crime.
The sixth article covers the organized crime and intelligence service links to the Bank of New York money laundering scandal.
The seventh article covers Vladimir Putin’s rise to the Russian Presidency and the mysterious and controversial September 1999 Moscow Apartment Bombings.
The eighth article covers the mysterious series of political assassinations and terrorist attacks that convulsed Putin’s early reign.
The ninth article covers how Putin consolidated the “vertical of power” at home through taming the oligarchs and controlling televised media.
The tenth article covers how Putin seized control over Russia’s strategic resources and uses them to pursue his interests abroad.
The eleventh article covers how Putin and the Kremlin use the spread of corruption abroad to further their strategic interests.
The twelfth article covers Putin’s relationship with the American Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush and the failure of American diplomacy.
The thirteenth article covers descent of Russo-American relations and Putin’s relationship with Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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William Browder, US Sanctions and the 2012 Magnitsky Act
Another low in Russian-American relations occurred early in Obama’s second term when he signed the Magnitsky Act into law.
The act was attached as an amendment to the repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a 1974 law that imposed trade penalties on the Soviet Union and other communist countries that denied their citizens the right to emigrate. It was intended to pressure the USSR into providing its Jewish citizens, often referred to as Refuseniks, with the right to emigrate to Israel or the United States.
The Magnitsky Act which replaced it gave the American Government the power to sanction, seize the assets of, and refuse entry to individual Russian officials deemed guilty of human rights abuses.
The Obama administration initially opposed the law, fearing it would complicate the already fraught relationship with Russia. Regardless, it had strong bipartisan support on the hill, passing the Senate 92–4 and was loudly championed by Senator John McCain.
The true champion of the Magnitsky Act was the investor-turned-activist Bill Browder, who orchestrated a savvy and emotionally powerful lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill that captured the attention of some of America’s most prominent lawmakers.
A complex and controversial figure in his own right, Browder emerged as one of the most public, vocal and effective international opponents of the Putin regime. Browder’s remarkable family history is as colorful as his present.
His Kansas-born Grandfather, Earl Browder, traveled to the Soviet Union to work as a labor organizer following the Bolshevik revolution. While there, he met his future wife Raisa Berkman.
Both were avid supporters of Joseph Stalin. Berkman became the first Jewish woman to graduate from law school in Leningrad and spent much of the 1920s condemning counterrevolutionaries.
When Earl Browder returned to the United States, he became the head of the American communist party and ran for president twice. Years later, it was discovered that Earl Browder (and possibly Raisa too) was a major recruiter of US-based spies for the KGB.
Bill Browder was born in Princeton, New Jersey to an accomplished mathematician and went on to study economics at the University of Chicago and ultimately received an M.B.A from Stanford. From an early age, he was determined not to follow in the footsteps of his notoriously left-wing grandfather.
“I would put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist,” Browder wrote in his 2015 memoir Red Notice. “Nothing would piss my family off more.”
In the chaotic last days of the Soviet Empire, Browder got his first taste of the “Wild East” after traveling to Poland while working for the Boston Consulting Group.
In this capacity, he was introduced to the phenomenon of post-communist privatization and quickly developed a knack for snatching up wildly undervalued shares of formerly state-owned enterprises.
After a stint in the early 90s working at a London-based trading desk for Saloman Brothers, Browder eventually moved to Moscow in 1996 and established Hermitage Capital.
Browder’s initial partners in Hermitage included the Lebanese-Brazilian Banker Edmond Safra and the currently-indicted Israeli diamond tycoon Beny Steinmetz.
Through his Republic National Bank in New York, Safra provided Browder with $25 million in seed capital and a troupe of Israeli bodyguards for his own protection.
Browder came to realize just how ludicrously underpriced assets were in the former Soviet Union after visiting a fleet of over 100 government owned fishing trawlers in Murmansk. The fleet was collectively worth nearly $200 million, but a 51% stake in soon to be formed private company was being sold for $2.5 million.
Gobsmacked by the opportunity, which was only one among many, Browder set down a path that lead him to become the largest foreign investor in Russia.
Browder navigated Hermitage through the treacherous shoals of Russia’s economic transformation, getting slammed by banking and market crashes in 1995 and 1998, but emerging each time stronger. At its height, Hermitage and associated accounts controlled over $4.5 billion in Russian assets.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Browder’s activities during this notoriously corrupt period of Russian history have come under intense scrutiny. In 1998, he renounced his US citizenship for tax purposes and became a naturalized British citizen.
One of Browder’s most lucrative investments was in Gazprom, whose value leapt from $3.5 billion in 1998 to an astounding $160 billion in 2005.
At the time, Russian regulators devised a dual-price structure that allowed Russian citizens and companies to purchase shares of the company at a cheaper rate than was available to foreigners. Browder circumvented the law and managed to buy shares for Hermitage at the cheaper rate by registering companies in Russia to do the buying.
Browder then distinguished himself by becoming a shareholder who held public press conferences in which lambasted Gazprom’s lack of transparency and malfeasance within its management.
Browder passed along dossiers to journalists outlining corruption among Russia’s rapacious oligarchs. While Browder undoubtedly exposed rampant abuse, some have questioned his motives for doing so.
“Looking back, I think he was absolutely right,” Moscow-based American Banker Bernie Sucher told The New Yorker for a profile on Browder. “The government needed that harsh spotlight.”
Sucher added, “I don’t think Bill started out with a passion for corporate governance. He found it to be an instrument that helped him and his investors make a lot of money. Ultimately, it became a sincere crusade.”
“The stealing going on in these companies was just so infuriating that it was both an emotional thing and a financial thing to fight it,” Browder has said in response to critics.
“I had a fiduciary responsibility to stop stealing from my clients — and that was for money. And you couldn’t help thinking this was just wrong and bad and not wanting them to get away with it. It’s not like I had one position before and then a second position afterwards. Lots of people can have lots of opinions about why I did things, but the reason I did was because it was fucking outrageous and unprofitable.”
In addition to using Russian-based shell companies to purchase assets at lower rates, Browder also took advantage of nuances in the Russian tax code. Hoping to spur regional investment, the Russian government established a low-tax zone in the province of Kalmykia. Taxes would be further reduced if a majority of a company’s employees were disabled.
Some of the companies Browder established to get a preferential share rate for Gazprom hired mentally handicapped employees who were listed on paper as “analysis division experts.” Browder has maintained that this practice was both legal and widespread in Russia at the time.
Though he would become Putin’s most famous international opponent, Browder initially thought highly of the Russian president.
“Yeltsin let the animals get out of the cages and start running the zoo in Russia,” Browder explained to a publication in 2000. “I think Putin’s going to put them back in, and that’s good for business.”
Even following the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Browder’s praise didn’t diminish. “We want an authoritarian — one who is exercising authority over the mafia and oligarchs,” Browder told the Times in 2004, adding that Putin “has turned out to be my biggest ally in Russia.”
Things changed dramatically for Browder in November 2005, when he was denied entry at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.
After being sent back to the UK, Browder learned that his Russian visa had been rescinded on national security grounds. He initially thought that his visa issues could be cleared up if he had an opportunity to speak with Putin personally, refusing to believe that the Russians would be foolish enough to expel their largest foreign investor.
S series of hotly contested events that unfolded shortly thereafter proved unequivocally that Browder would never be welcome in Russia again. Lucky for him, he had been cautious enough to remove most of his assets from Russia while maintaining his various investment vehicles.
According to Browder, on June 4th, 2007, two dozen police officers led by Artem Kuznetsov, a Lieutenant Colonel in Russia’s Interior Ministry, raided Hermitage’s Moscow offices.
The raid was officially part of an investigation into Kameya, one of the shell companies that Hermitage had established in Kalmykia.
During the raid, officers confiscated thousands of internal documents, as well as Hermitage’s original corporate seals and stamps.
While Browder admits that Hermitage had been investigated for tax avoidance in the past, he maintains that the June 4th raid came out of the blue and Hermitage was not in arrears at the time nor had Russian authorities made any specific tax claims against it at the time.
Following the raids, as Browder tells it, he hired a 35-year old Russian tax attorney named Sergei Magnitsky to investigate the ominous events.
In a series of articles that question certain, specific claims made by Browder, the German periodical Der Spiegel has pointed out that Kuznetsov had written letters to Hermitage as far back as June 2006 demanding access to the firm’s bank data. Furthermore, Browder’s characterization of Magnitsky is called into question.
Der Spiegel points out that in fact Magnitsky was not a tax attorney, but rather a tax advisor who worked at Firestone Duncan, a law firm that had advised Hermitage for over a decade.
Magnitsky had been involved with establishing a variety of companies Hermitage had incorporated in Kalmykia and was questioned by Russian authorities in 2006 in a separate tax inquiry.
“DER SPIEGEL does not uncritically adopt rulings made by the Russian judiciary,” the publication wrote in 2019. “A conclusive clarification as to whether the accusations of tax evasion were valid would have to be performed by an independent court in a fair trial. But it is clear that the investigations didn’t suddenly start in 2007 as Browder claims, allegedly with no basis. The investigations have a well documented backstory.”
Regardless of the validity of the tax evasion case against Hermitage, the Russian official response was marred by corruption and criminality.
According to court documents filed in New York’s Southern District by former United States Attorney Preet Bharara, over a month before the raid Lt. Col. Artem Kuzentsov flew to Larnaca, Cyprus and met with a Russian criminal and fraudster named Dmitry Klyuev.
Klyuev was at that time the owner of the Russian bank Universal Savings Bank (USB). Two years earlier, he had been convicted of attempting to steal shares from an iron-ore company but his sentence was commuted.
Kuznetsov and Klyuev were met in Larnaca on April 30th, 2007 by Pavel Karpov, a major in the Russian Interior Ministry, and a Russian lawyer named Andrey Pavlov.
A year earlier, Pavlov had participated in a scheme against an investment firm called Rengaz that would be adopted almost identically against Hermitage. The scheme unfolded as follows: complicit law enforcement raided Rengaz and seized all the documents necessary to establish counterfeit subsidiaries.
Once this was done, a second set of shell companies was established with fake “directors” who filed false claims against the counterfeit subsidiaries. The claims were dealt with in a Russian arbitration court, where Pavlov and the other lawyers involved were secretly representing both sides of the proceedings.
After the courts ruled in favor of the “claimants,” the counterfeit companies were made to appear as if they had suffered massive losses on paper that had erased their profits. Russian law permits companies that have incurred losses after paying taxes to request tax refunds.
From there, the Moscow tax offices number 25 and 28, both filled with complicit officials, approved a “refund.” In the Rengaz case, the conspirators walked away with $107 million. When they enacted an identical scheme on Hermitage, they walked away with much more.
Pavlov had known Klyuev since 2001 and UBS had handled transactions in the Regnaz fraud. Shortly thereafter, Klyuev met with Olga Stepanova, the head of the same Moscow tax office №28 that had been used against Rengaz. A month later, the raid on Hermitage took place.
Using the official documents and corporate seals seized, the conspirators transferred the Kalmykia-based Hermitage companies over to a counterfeit subsidiary called PLUTON.
The director of PLUTON was listed as Victor Markelov, a former saw mill employee who had been previously convicted of manslaughter and was also used as a “director” in the Rengaz Scheme.
Markelov had previously been fingered in courtroom testimony as having been involved in a kidnapping and extortion ring with Dmitry Klyuev.
The conspirators diversified their stolen companies across additional layers of front companies, listing other petty criminals as “directors,” many of whom had connections to Klyuev’s UBS bank.
As in the Rengaz case, the conspirators forged backdated contracts with sham “counterparties,” also fronted by UBS-linked “directors,” that were used in arbitration court proceedings once again headed by Andrey Pavlov, who promptly conceded full liability.
After the “losses” suffered by the counterfeit subsidiaries were presented to complicit officials at Moscow tax offices no. 25 and 28, the conspirators were awarded a staggering $230 million tax refund.
Notably, the money came not from Hermitage, but rather was pilfered from Russian tax payers.
In the months following the raid, Browder’s tax advisor Sergei Magnitsky began to uncover the alleged fraud being perpetrated against Hermitage.
By the end of the year, Hermitage filed six criminal complaints explicitly naming Interior Ministry officers Artem Kuzentsov and Pavel Karpov as co-conspirators in the massive fraud scheme.
Most were rejected outright, and according to the SDNY Criminal Complaint, one was handed over for Karpov himself to investigate, despite the fact that he was listed as a suspect.
In June 2008, Magnitsky testified against Kuznetsov and Karpov before a Russian investigative committee. At his point, Magnitsky’s lawyer counseled him to flee the country, but Magnitsky refused and testified yet again in October.
The Russian Interior Ministry responded by placing Kuznetsov at the head of the investigation into the $230,000 fraud, despite the fact that he had been accused of participating in the scheme.
Less than a month later, he ordered the arrest of Magnitsky. Over the next 11-months, Magnitsky was shuttled between three Moscow pre-trial detention facilities and suffered from being placed in appalling conditions.
He was placed in heavily overcrowded, dimly lit cells, allowed just one ten minute shower on a weekly basis and was often given food infested with worms. Magnitsky developed pancreatitis and gallstones which were left untreated even after a doctor had ordered that he be operated upon.
On November 16th, 2009, Magnitsky, suffering from immense pain due to his untreated health issues, was taken to a holding cell in the medical wing of Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison.
He was allegedly handcuffed to a bed and beaten, dying at 10pm.
After learning of Magnitsky’s death, Browder aggressively moved forward with his campaign to punish the Russian officials involved, culminating in the passage of the Magnitsky act in 2012.
Putin responded furiously, imposing sanctions on 18 American officials who the Russians claimed had been involved in the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
With Putin’s full support, the Duma to matters a step further and passed a law banning the adoption of Russian orphans by American families. Russia at the time had an estimated 800,000 children in need of adoption, and the ban placed a halt on adoptions already in progress.
After facing difficult questions from the Russian press corps following the ban, Putin exploded in anger and accused American officials of refusing to follow-up on investigations into the abuse of Russian adoptees.
“Do you think this is normal?” Putin snapped. “How can it be normal when you are humiliated? Do you like it? Are you a masochist?”
Eurasianism, Revolution in Ukraine and the Invasion of Crimea — A Final Collapse in US-Russian Relations
Yale Professor Timothy Snyder argues that Putin has slowly but firmly fallen under the spell of the early-20th Century Russian religious and political theorizer Ivan Ilyin.
“The oligarch-in-chief, Vladimir Putin, chose the fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin as his guide,” Snyder writes.
“The faciscm of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin’s era, had three core features: it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than a set of problems.”
While Ilyin died in obscurity in Switzerland, Putin organized his reburial in Moscow in 2005.
Shortly thereafter, Putin took to quoting Ilyin in speeches and in radio commentary. Eurasianist thought in Russia dates back to the 1920s. Its ideology holds that the Mongol conquests severed Russia from the decadent traditions of Europe and created a unique, “pure” civilization with a messianic purpose in the world.
In the 1990s, these ideas began to resurface in Russia and in particular are associated with the neo-fascist Russian intellectual Aleksandr Dugin.
According to Snyder, Dugin used the terms “Eurasia” and “Eurasianism” to filter Nazi ideas into a Russian context that focused on the corruption of the West and the evil of the Jews.
Dugin’s political ideas were influenced by a relationship he formed in the early 1990s with Jean Parvulescu, a Romania intellectual living in Paris. Parvelescu was a conspiracy theorist and heir to the ideas of Julius Evola, an occultist and leading figure in European neo-fascism.
Parvulescu explained to Dugin that the world could be divided between the people of the land and the people of the sea, “Eurasianists” and “Atlanticists.”. Atlanticist peoples, i.e. the British and Americans, are defined by maritime economies that separate them from the “earthy truths” and leave them susceptible to “abstract (Jewish) culture.”
These were reworkings of Nazi ideas. Dugin later wrote under a pen name that referenced the Nazi war criminal Wolfram Sievers.
Upon returning to Russia in 1993, Dugin, whom friends called the “St. Cyril and Methodius of fascism,” founded the National Bolshevik Party. Dugin openly called for “fascism, borderless and red,” and his followers were known for raising their fists and hailing death.
Marlene Laruelle points to three reasons for the resurgence of Eurasianism in Russia today: “First, it combats the prevalent feeling of failure associated with the turbulence of the 1990s by justifying the experience in strictly ethnic and culturalist terms.
“Second, it offers a simplistic understanding of the conflicts of the post-Cold War world and of Russia’s role in international politics.”
“Finally, it has aided in the elaboration of a pseudo-scientific speak which avoids politics and justifies authoritarianism through culture.”
Dugin’s ideas began circulating among high level Russian officials. In 1999, he became a special advisor to the speaker of the Duma Gennady Seleznev.
Dugin’s 1997 work Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia is required reading for every Russian military officer above the rank of colonel at the General Staff Academy.
In Foundations, Dugin writes, “At the global level, for the construction of a planetary New Empire the chief ‘scapegoat’ will namely be the USA — the undermining of whose power which (up to the complete destruction of its geopolitical constructs) will be realized systematically and uncompromisingly by the participants of the New Empire.”
“The Eurasian Project presupposes in this its relationship of Eurasian expansion in South and Central America to remove its output from under the control of the North (here, the Hispanic factor could be used as a traditional alternative to the Anglo-Saxon) and also to provoke every kind of destabilization and separatism within the borders of the USA (it might be possible to lean on the political forces of the African-American racists).”
“The ancient Roman formula of ‘Carthage must be destroyed,’ will become the absolute motto of the Eurasian Empire, because it itself will absorb the essence of all geopolitical planetary strategy awakening to its continental mission.”
Eurasianist ideas gained credence among Putin’s closest advisors and were discussed during late night meetings. They further found a geopolitical vehicle in a proposed, Russian-led alternative to the European Union (EU), the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Putin hoped that he could cajole post-Soviet states such as Ukraine to join it, as opposed to the Western-dominated EU.
American policy makers in the Obama administration were united in their opposition to the EEU, chief among them was Hillary Clinton. In 2012 Clinton described the EEU as “a move to re-Sovietize the region.”
She continued, “We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”
The spread of Eurasianist ideas in the upper echelons of Kremlin leadership coincided with an emerging conservatism in the Orthodox Church that Putin encouraged.
Following an anti-Putin protest by the Russian female punk group Pussy Riot in an Orthodox church, the Duma passed an anti-blasphemy law in 2013 with the support of Putin.
Months later, another law was passed that imposed fines for propagandizing “nontraditional” sexual relationships among minors, nontraditional being a colloquialism for homosexual.
The law was as much a rebuke to the values of the EU as it was a statement of renewed Russian social conservatism.
Putin presented himself as a defender of Orthodox values and the great foe of the EU and the decadent, degenerate values he argued it represented.
“In many countries today, moral and ethical norms are being reconsidered; national traditions, differences in nation and culture are being erased,” Putin said in his 2013 state of the nation speech at the Kremlin.
“They’re now requiring not only the proper acknowledgement of freedom of conscience, political views and private life, but also the mandatory acknowledgement of the equality of good and evil, which are inherently contradictory concepts.”
Putin arrived in Ukraine in July 2013 hellbent on preventing its government from signing what was known as the Association Agreement, which would have put Ukraine on a path towards joining the EU. It was a path many in Ukraine, especially in the south and west, wanted to travel down.
Three years earlier, future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had engineered a stunning political comeback that saw Viktor Yanukovych win the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election.
While campaigning against the Association Agreement, Putin appeared with Yanukovych at the Monastery of the Caves, one of the holiest sites in Orthodox Christianity to commemorate the baptism of Prince Volodymyr, the founder of the medieval state of Kievan Rus that both Russia and Ukraine look to as the predecessor to their modern states.
Putin spoke at the ceremony, emphasizing the historical linkages between and “common destiny” of Russia and Ukraine. “We are all spiritual heirs of what happened here 1,025 years ago.”
Putin had let his view on Ukraine slip at a 2008 NATO conference in Bucharest in which Putin referred to the country as an “artificial state.”
He went on to tell George W. Bush, who was present at the meeting, “Ukraine is not even a state. Part of its territory is in Eastern Europe and the greater part is a gift from us.”
The gift Putin was referring to was Crimea, which Khruschev had transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954.
It should be noted that Putin’s view on this matter was not an outlier in Russia. Writing in 1990, the famous Soviet dissident and political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stated in an essay, “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood.”
Putin attempted to coerce Ukraine into dropping the Association Agreement by launching a trade war. Russia banned the imports of goods built by Roshen, a company owned by Ukraine’s pro-EU foreign minister.
In August 2013, Russia placed a stranglehold on nearly all commercial activity with Ukraine through draconian enforcement of customs.
The next month Putin’s special envoy to Ukraine, Sergei Glazyev travelled to Yalta in Crimea and issued a chilling warning to Ukraine that signing the Association Agreement would be akin to suicide.
Glazyev served as Putin’s personal advisor on Eurasian integration. He was also a member of the Eurasianist think tank the Izborsk Club, alongside Alexander Dugin and the fascist novelist Alexander Prokhanov.
Part of the Izborsk Club’s founding manifesto reads, “Today’s Russian State, despite the loss of great territories, still carries the mark of empire. The geopolitics of the Eurasian continent once again forcefully gathers spaces that had been lost. This is the legitimation of the “Eurasian project” initiated by Putin.”
In October, Putin met with Yanukovych in Russian resort city Sochi, soon to be the site of the Winter Olympics. He had never cared for Yanukovych personally and felt the Ukrainian leader was betraying him by even holding conversations with the Europeans.
Throughout the process, Putin warned Yanukovych that the Europeans would never accept him, that even if he did sign the agreement he would be overthrown and replaced by his political enemies.
Putin also issued direct threats, some of them aimed at Yanukovych personally. The Ukrainian president left Russia visibly shaken.
A second, secret meeting took place between Putin and Yanukovych at a military airport outside of Moscow on November 9th. It was here Putin broke the back of whatever was left of Yanukovych’s resistance. Prior to the meeting the plan had been to sign the agreement, after it ended this was no longer the case.
On November 21st, 2013, Yanukovych ordered the suspension of negotiations between Ukraine and the EU over the Association Agreement, which most observers had expected to be signed at the upcoming Vilnius Summit. The act sent shockwaves throughout the pro-EU constituencies in Ukrainian society, and left EU diplomats dismayed.
American diplomats in Moscow were unsurprised. Michael McFaul assessed that Ukraine meant more to Russia than it did to the EU.
Events on the ground in Ukraine itself upended the calculations of all parties involved.
The day Yanukovych announced the death of the Association Agreement, hundreds of pro-EU Ukrainians gathered on the Maidan Square in central Kiev. Over the next few days they were joined by thousands. These early protests eventually attracted up to 100,000 people.
This time the protestors weren’t waving orange, but flags sporting the stars of the EU and the Ukrainian national colors of blue and yellow.
As the crowds swelled, the political crisis in Kiev spread to Moscow, Brussels and Washington. The EuroMaidan revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, was underway.
The protests were a grassroots movement representing a broad cross-section of Ukrainians who were pro-EU or just disgusted with the prevailing corruption of the Yanukovych regime. Though they started out peacefully, signs of impending violence began to emerge. On November 24th, protestors clashed with police outside a government building.
At 4:30am on November 30th, the Berkut riot police violently cleared Maidan square, beating dozens of protestors and students and badly injuring 79 in the process.
The next day protesters reoccupied the square and the crisis deepened. Within days, government buildings were being occupied and protestors were setting up encampments and barricades.
As winter descended across Ukraine, there were no signs that the protests were about to let up any time soon.
Yanukovych was paralyzed before the growing protest movement, vainly hoping the cold winds of winter would disperse the crowds and end the crisis.
On December 17th, as the situation in Kiev grew more dire, he met with Putin again in Sochi. Putin sought to shore up Yanukovych’s shaky regime by offering $15 billion in loans to Ukraine and reducing the price of Russian gas sold to the country by a third.
Putin even issued a public statement, that few believed, downplaying the likelihood that Ukraine would join the EEU.
Just days earlier, Senator John McCain visited protesters in Kiev.
“Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better,” McCain said in a speech before a large crowd. “We are here to support your just cause, the sovereign right of Ukraine to determine its own destiny freely and independently. And the destiny you seek lies in Europe.”
Despite McCain’s pro-Euromaidan rhetoric, which undoubtedly infuriated the Kremlin, American policymakers were far from unified on what the protests could achieve.
“Obama was wary,” former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes later wrote. “He didn’t see the protests as a chance to transform Ukraine because he was skeptical that such a transformation could take place.”
The tumult in Ukraine was taking place less than two years after much of North Africa and the Middle East had been convulsed by the Arab Spring. Most of the countries involved had either slipped back into despotism, or, in the case of Syria, descended into brutal civil war.
Obama’s view, and one that was shared by many in Europe as well, was that the Western powers should strive for a settlement that would keep the gradual integration of Ukraine with Europe on track.
Perhaps the most controversial American official to figure prominently in the events rocking Ukraine was Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.
Nuland traveled to Kiev where, before meeting with Yanukovych, she visited an encampment of protestors. Along with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland was filmed passing out sandwiches, pastries and cookies. The Kremlin propaganda apparatus seized on the footage as evidence that the American Government was behind the protests.
Two months later an audio recording, believed to have been intercepted by Russian intelligence, was leaked of a conversation between Nuland and Pyatt. The recording was anonymously posted on YouTube under the title “Puppets of Maidan.”
It captured Nuland and Pyatt discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Ukrainian opposition leaders. It also revealed differences in how the US and EU were approaching the crisis.
The most explosive line came from Nuland, who in reference to getting the UN involved said “So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the U.N. help glue it and you know … fuck the EU.”
“I was stunned,” Ben Rhodes recalled. “The Russians had almost certainly intercepted the phone call. That was hardly surprising — in these jobs, you have to assume that any number of governments could be listening in if you’re not on a secure phone.”
“What was new was the act of releasing the intercepted call and doing it so brazenly, on social media… A Rubicon had been crossed — the Russians no longer stopped at hacking information; now, triggered by the threat of Ukraine sliding out of their sphere of influence, they were willing to hack information and put it into the public domain.”
As the protests showed no sign of abating, the Russians finally decided to take decisive action. According to documents discovered by Ukrainian authorities, Putin’s chief ideologue Vladislav Surkov ordered explosives, specialist weapons and crowd control equipment to arrive in Kiev by December 26th.
On January 6th, Kiev-based FSB officers drew up two plans called “Operation Boomerang” and “Operation Wave” designed to wipe out the protests using overwhelming force.
The plan called for 10,000 internal troops, 12,000 police and 2,000 Berkut riot police to seal off Maidan Square while special forces and Ukrainian security service snipers took out key protestors as the surrounding buildings were stormed. However, the full extent of the plan could not be executed as there was push back among the security forces.
The descent into violence began on February 18th and reached a crescendo on the 20th. Over 100 civilian protesters were killed, many by sniper fire. Ukrainians would later refer to these victims as the Heavenly Hundred and subsequent government authorities blamed dozens of Russian FSB agents for the civilian deaths, a claim the FSB had vociferously denied.
18 riot police were also killed and there have been numerous reports of gunfire coming from the protestors. Conspiracy theories regarding these pivotal days are widely subscribed to, with many in Russia believing it was a CIA provocation.
Hoping to forestall further bloodshed, European diplomats raced to Kiev and met with Yanukovych. The discussions, which were denounced by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, revolved around a compromise in which Ukraine would hold early elections and the protesters would receive amnesty.
Mid-meeting, a panicked Yanukovych broke off negotiations to call Putin. Putin was in Sochi for the Winter Olympics, seething that $51 billion dollar games he had spent years planning were being sullied and overshadowed by the violence in Kiev.
Yanukovych explained to Putin that he was ordering the withdrawal of the riot police and would be holding new elections.
“You will have anarchy,” Putin shouted. “There will be chaos in the capital.”
Despite Putin’s protests, Yanukovych accepted the European compromise. However, by that time the protesters refused anything other than Yanukovych’s ousters.
Possibly frightened by reports that protesters were receiving arms shipments from the West, Yanukovych fled the capital for Eastern Ukraine and eventually Crimea.
After an emergency meeting that went into the early morning hours of February 23rd, Putin ordered a mission to secretly shepherd Yanukovych to the southern Russian city of Rostov.
“He would have been killed,” Putin later claimed. “We got ready to get him right out of Donetsk by land, by sea or by air.”
Michael McFaul was in Sochi for the Olympic’s with Bill Burns when they heard the news that the Yanukovych government had fallen. Both agreed that they could expect a severe reaction from Putin. They attempted to arrange a hasty meeting between Putin and Burns but the Kremlin refused.
“I am guessing [Putin] believed the CIA had again overthrown an anti-American regime,” McFaul later mused, “just as he thought they had in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in 2011, and tried to do against him in 2011–12. After we allegedly toppled his ally in Ukraine, Putin was done worrying about what we thought of him or how we could cooperate.”
Putin was done worrying about what the West thought of him. At the same meeting where Yanukovych’s rescue operation was greenlit, Putin set another momentous plan in motion.
“We ended at about seven in the morning,” Putin later described. “When we were parting, I said to my colleagues: we must start working on returning Crimea to Russia.”
Four days later, reports of mysterious “Little Green Men” entering Crimean territory began to circulate. In fact, these were Russian soldiers and members of the GRU in unmarked uniforms.
It was the beginning of the Russian annexation of Crimea, the first violation of national borders in Europe since the Second World War.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Russian diplomats and Vladimir Putin himself denied that the invasion was taking place at all. The Russian invasion led to a war that engulfed much of eastern Ukraine and killed thousands.
In a referendum not recognized by Kiev or the international community that took place barely a month later, amidst the presence of heavily armed Russian troops, Russia claimed that 93% of Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.
The United States and its allies responded by imposing sweeping sanctions on Russian individuals and companies involved with the annexation. While Obama officials believed that their response to Russian aggression in Ukraine was swifter and firmer than Bush’s response had been to aggression directed against Georgia, Republican critics on the Hill castigated the administration for what they perceived as a weak response.
“Some even praised Putin as a strong leader, someone to be admired,” Ben Rhodes later wrote. “Watching this, Obama told me that it represented something of a turning point for a Republican party that had been rooted in opposition to Russia for decades.”
“In Obama’s view,” Rhodes continued, “the praise for Putin that you could see on Fox News went beyond partisanship, though that was part of it; Putin was a white man standing up for politics rooted in patriarchy, tribe, and religion, the antiglobalist.”
Some of these folks,” Obama told Rhodes, referring to hard right elements in the United States, “have more in common with Putin than with me.”
While in the KGB, Putin was taught that the United States was the “Main Enemy.”
From this perspective, US-backed NGO’s in Russia or Ukraine weren’t there to strengthen civil society, combat corruption, monitor elections and promote democracy, but were Western intelligence fronts fomenting rebellion, revolution and regime change.
The Iraq War, the post-Soviet Color Revolutions, the Arab Spring, the 2011 protests in Moscow, Eurasianist ideology and the Maidan Revolution all contributed to strengthening Putin’s convictions and worldview.
So he waited, biding his time, for his opportunity to strike back and wreak his revenge.