Why
Putin hates Hillary
Behind
the allegations of a Russian hack of the Democrats is the Kremlin
leader’s fury at Clinton for challenging the fairness of Russian
elections.
By
Michael Crowley and
Julia Ioffe
7/26/16, 5:11 AM CET
Updated 7/26/16,
7:36 AM CET
When mass protests
against Russian President Vladimir Putin erupted in Moscow in
December 2011, Putin made clear who he thought was really behind
them: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
With the protesters
accusing Putin of having rigged recent elections, the Russian leader
pointed an angry finger at Clinton, who had issued a statement
sharply critical of the voting results. “She said they were
dishonest and unfair,” Putin fumed in public remarks, saying that
Clinton gave “a signal” to demonstrators working “with the
support of the U.S. State Department” to undermine his power. “We
need to safeguard ourselves from this interference in our internal
affairs,” Putin declared.
Five years later,
Putin may be seeking revenge against Clinton. At least that’s the
implication of the view among some cyber-security experts that Russia
was behind the recent hack of the Democratic National Committee’s
email server, which has sowed confusion and dissent at the Democratic
convention and undercut Clinton’s goal of party unity.
While Donald Trump’s
budding bromance with Vladimir Putin is well known— the two men
have exchanged admiring words about one another, and called for
improved relations between Washington and Moscow — Putin’s
hostility towards Clinton draws less attention.
Former U.S.
officials who worked on Russia policy with Clinton say that Putin was
personally stung by Clinton’s December 2011 condemnation of
Russia’s parliamentary elections, and had his anger communicated
directly to President Barack Obama. They say Putin and his advisers
are also keenly aware that, even as she executed Obama’s “reset”
policy with Russia, Clinton took a harder line toward Moscow than
others in the administration. And they say Putin sees Clinton as a
forceful proponent of “regime change” policies that the Russian
leader considers a grave threat to his own survival.
“He was very upset
[with Clinton] and continued to be for the rest of the time that I
was in government,” said Michael McFaul, who served as the top
Russia official in Obama’s national security council from 2009 to
December 2011 and then was U.S. ambassador to Moscow until early
2014. “One could speculate that this is his moment for payback.”
The notion of
payback remains speculation. Some experts are unconvinced that
Putin’s government engineered the DNC email hack or that it was
meant to influence the election in Trump’s favor as opposed to
embarrassing DNC officials for any number of reasons.
But the Clinton
campaign has embraced the theory, with campaign manager Robby Mook
seeming to endorse the notion of Russian involvement on CNN Sunday.
Clinton aides have been gratified to see the story leap onto
television, which had previously given little coverage to Trump’s
views about Russia, and noted that even Fox News commentator Charles
Krauthammer on Sunday called the allegation of Russian meddling
“troubling” and “plausible.”
And while
Clintonites realize that few Americans typically pay close attention
to the state of U.S.-Russia relations, there are two important
caveats. One is the presence of large Polish, Ukrainian and other
eastern European populations in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania,
Ohio and Wisconsin, where the Clinton campaign plans to flag stories
about Trump and Putin for ethnic media outlets. The other is that
voters of all stripes will surely pay attention to serious talk of
foreign influence in the election.
While experts debate
whether Putin would actually try to meddle in a U.S. election, there
is consensus on the idea that Clinton is unloved within the Kremlin.
“I think there is good and credible evidence that there is no love
lost in Moscow for Mrs. Clinton,” said Eugene Rumer, a former
national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National
Intelligence Council now at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
Clinton has never
concealed her own disdain for Putin. As a senator in 2008 she joked
about George W. Bush’s famous line that he’d gotten a sense of
Putin’s “soul,” cracking that because Putin was a KGB agent,
“by definition he doesn’t have a soul.”
On arrival in the
Obama administration in 2009, at a moment of U.S.-Russian tensions
over Putin’s 2008 invasion of the Republic of Georgia, Clinton was
tasked with implementing Obama’s “reset” of relations with
Moscow, an attempt to collaborate on areas of common interest even
while acknowledging unresolved differences on a range of issues.
Though skeptical of the effort, Clinton felt that Dmitry Medvedev, a
former prime minister who had swapped jobs with Putin to become
president, might be easier to deal with than Putin.
“Clinton was a
more skeptical voice on the reset,” McFaul says. “She was tougher
on the Russians. She pushed back. She was a difficult interlocutor
with both [foreign minister Sergei] Lavrov and Putin — and I say
that as a compliment.”
The reset effort was
troubled from the very start: Clinton arrived with a novelty button
for a press conference with Lavrov. It was supposed to say “reset,”
but instead said “overload” — which Lavrov didn’t fail to
mention. Clinton became the butt of Russian jokes over this typo. Yet
the reset had its successes, including a NATO transit point on
Russian soil for troops headed to Afghanistan and a new nuclear arms
reduction treaty.
Behind the scenes,
however, Clinton and Putin — who, it soon became clear, was still
the real power in the Kremlin — had an uneasy dance. In March 2010,
when Clinton visited Russia, Putin summoned her to his luxurious
residence outside Moscow. Knowing her fondness for wildlife
elephants, in particular — Putin invited Clinton to a basement
trophy room filled with mounted animal heads. (A Clinton aide later
described the gesture, though well meaning, as having a Bond villain
feel.) Yet when the two emerged for a photo-op, Putin launched into a
public scolding of Clinton. The slouching Russian rattled off a list
of complaints, from a decline in U.S.-Russia trade in to the impact
sanctions against Iran and North Korea were having on Russian
companies.
But Clinton knew how
to play tough with the Russian officials, some of whom referred to
her with both derision and respect as “a lady with balls.” When
McFaul arrived in Moscow in January 2012, he faced harassment,
including the reporter with a Kremlin-controlled TV channel who
followed him everywhere and the Russian secret services who followed
his children to school.
One day, Clinton
called an exasperated McFaul at the ambassador’s residence in
Moscow to express her anger at the Russian violation of diplomatic
protocol. McFaul was stunned that Clinton had called on an unsecure
line, especially when the two had plans to meet soon anyway. “Oh, I
want them to know that I know,” Clinton said, in McFaul’s
recollection.
In September 2012,
Clinton was to meet with Lavrov on the sidelines of the APEC summit
in Vladivostok, Russia. Lavrov, a sophisticated member of the Soviet
foreign policy aristocracy, took great pleasure in being gentlemanly
toward Clinton. He personally picked out the flowers for her hotel
room in Vladivostok. But when they met, Lavrov slammed her with some
unexpected news: Russia was kicking out USAID and gave the Secretary
of State 30 days to pack them up and move them out. Stunned, Clinton
stood up and walked out. According to people with knowledge of the
meeting, Lavrov tried to get her to stay and talk, but Clinton wasn’t
having any of it. She dropped her notes and said he could read those
if he wanted to talk, and walked out.
But nothing angered
Putin as much as Clinton’s statement about Russia’s December 2011
parliamentary elections, which produced widespread allegations of
fraud and vote-rigging on behalf of Putin allies. At a conference in
Lithuania, Clinton issued a biting statement saying that the Russian
people “deserve to have their voices heard and their votes counted,
and that means they deserve fair, free transparent elections and
leaders who are accountable to them.” Some Obama officials felt the
provocative statement went too far.
It certainly
provoked Putin, who soon accused his opponents of organizing with
State Department money. One former State Department official who
worked on Russia issues under Clinton suggests that Putin’s outrage
over that statement might have been manufactured, a classic effort by
a strongman to tarnish his domestic opposition as foreign puppets.
McFaul says he is confident that Putin was genuinely angry.
Whether Putin
genuinely believed that Clinton was plotting his overthrow is another
question. But he has repeatedly criticized the U.S. for “regime
change” policies that have toppled authoritarians in other
countries, including Iraq and Libya that Clinton supported. In the
latter case, Putin was furious when a 2011 U.S. and European military
operation billed as humanitarian—and advocated by Clinton—evolved
into a de facto campaign against dictator Muammar Qadhafi.
Putin reportedly
obsessed over Qaddafi’s violent death in Kremlin meetings. The
graphic video of the Libya ruler’s bloodied body being dragged by a
mob is often replayed on Russian television, along with Clinton’s
wisecrack about the executed strongman: “We came, we saw, he died.”
Since leaving
government, Clinton has had almost exclusively tough words for Putin,
especially following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. At a March
2014 fundraiser, Clinton compared Putin’s action “to what Hitler
did back in the ’30s.”
But few would have
guessed that Clinton herself might wind up wondering whether she
herself had become a target of Putin’s aggression.
“I think they
expect her to win,” said one diplomat with extensive Russia
experience, who believes the Kremlin directed the email hack. “But
they’re sending her a message that they are a power to be reckoned
with and can mess with her at will, so she had better take them
seriously.”
Authors:
Michael Crowley and
Julia Ioffe
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