“As good a diplomat as it gets.”
Only twice in history did a Soviet official testify before the United States Congress. The second of those occasions was May Day of 1986, when the USSR’s embassy in Washington dispatched its 34-year-old second secretary on an hour’s notice to speak about the recent nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl.
The young diplomat parried the Congressmen’s skeptical questioning with perfect English and preternatural poise. “I am not an expert on nuclear power,” he deadpanned in opening remarks. “We do not have a nuclear power plant in our embassy.” Oregon Representative Ron Wyden pressed him: “Can you tell me, in layman’s terms, what happened, why it happened?” The Russian paused, then replied, “Can you tell me in those same layman’s terms how the Challenger accident happened? I’m trying not to be polemical, but it’s a technical matter.” New York Congressman James Scheuer demanded an explanation for Moscow’s stinginess with information about the event. The diplomat answered, “I find it offensive that people say you didn’t do this or didn’t do that without knowing the facts. If you want to talk to my country in a commanding tone, forget it.”
The performance—dubbed “smooth and polished” by a State Department official and a “real kick” by the Los Angeles Times television critic—was quintessential Vitaly Churkin: smart, pointed, funny, and unyielding in defense of his brief. When Churkin died 30 years later, he was at his desk in New York, serving in his 11th year as Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations (UN). While he is best known from his time at the UN, a glance at his whole diplomatic resume reveals a veritable Zelig of Russian relations with the West over the past 40 years. He was an arms control negotiator in the 1970s, worked in Washington for much of the 1980s, and was the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman at the time of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. He managed to keep that job in the new Russian Federation’s Foreign Ministry, then went on to serve as special envoy to the Balkans during the war in Bosnia, liaison to NATO, and Ambassador to Belgium and Canada before moving to the UN.
His long and capable service under such a staggeringly diverse set of circumstances, leaders, and policies could be interpreted simply as cynical careerism and dedication to personal advancement. Another possible interpretation is a sort of unreflective nationalism—a devotion to Russian national interests, regardless of a regime’s policies or philosophical orientation. Indeed, those familiar with Churkin from the final chapter of his career might think of him mainly as the unabashed flack for Vladimir Putin’s various crimes against Russia’s neighbors, Syria’s civilians, and Western liberal democracy.
But these explanations for Churkin’s success are an awkward fit with his remarkable record and reputation. Leonid Slutsky, the Russian Parliament’s international affairs committee’s chairman, declared him to be “the greatest diplomat of modern times.” It wasn’t only his countrymen who admired him. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called him “a brilliant diplomat and a dear friend.” In the estimation of Italy’s former UN Ambassador, Cesare Gagaglini, Churkin “was as good a diplomat as it gets. I’m not saying it just because we were friends. That’s what everyone thought.” Henry Kissinger said simply, “out of many ambassadors I saw in my life, he was one of the most extraordinary.”
Most striking is the praise from his staunchest adversaries. Samantha Power was America’s UN ambassador from 2013 to 2017 and tangled with Churkin regularly in the Security Council, sometimes with no small amount of vitriol. In one notorious exchange, Power excoriated the governments of Russia, Syria, and Iran for defending large-scale attacks on civilians in Aleppo. “Are you truly incapable of shame?” she asked. “Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?” Churkin responded by sarcastically comparing Power to Mother Theresa, imploring her to “remember the track record of your country.”
Yet, when Churkin died only a few months later, Power eulogized him in the New York Times as “a good friend and one of the best hopes the United States and Russia had of working together.” These apparently bitter rivals, it turned out, accompanied each other to sporting events, the theater, and even Thanksgiving dinner at the Power family’s home. It was not only Churkin’s professionalism or patriotism or cultural refinement that distinguished him, she argued. It was also his commitment to seeking common ground in the relationship between Russia and the United States.
That relationship is today at a post-Cold War nadir, and Kremlinology is fashionable again. While Vladimir Putin dominates the attention of its new practitioners, the hardest questions they face deal with what will follow Putin. Alternative scenarios for Russia’s future are often cast in terms of contrasting visions between the authoritarianism and kleptocracy of “Putinism” and the promise of liberal democratic reform represented by opposition figures like the late Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny.1 In foreign policy, this dichotomy is usually mapped directly to the competing historical proclivities of Russian elites—some aspiring to and others contemptuous of Western political values and partnership.
But there is a third scenario that is distinct from either of these poles. A Russia that is not thoroughly liberal, yet freer from state control and corruption; assertive of its regional interests, but with less militarism and subversion; skeptical of American global power, but not committed to frustrating its ambitions at every turn.
Vitaly Churkin’s extraordinary career offers us a symbol of the continuity and also the complexity inherent in Russia’s fraught relationship with the West. Coexisting not only in one national identity but in one man was a literate, sophisticated, even sympathetic understanding of Western culture, power, and political liberalism alongside a profoundly conservative, exceptionalist view of Russia in the world. Could Churkin’s past, therefore, serve as a window into the future of Russian foreign policy?
“You’re a real sharp guy. How about defecting?”
Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin found his first notoriety in front of movie cameras. As a child and young teenager in the 1960s, he performed in a few prominent feature films and was a competitive speed skater, but ultimately opted out of a career in show business or sports. Upon graduation from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, he joined the Soviet Foreign Ministry and was assigned to work in Vienna and Geneva on the ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with the United States. There he distinguished himself first as a translator, not only for his skill, but also his sense of humor and rapport with the American negotiators.2
The experience was good preparation for his subsequent assignment to the Soviet embassy in Washington, where he served from 1982 to 1987. For an historic vantage point on U.S.-Soviet relations over the 1970s and 1980s, the arms control portfolio could hardly be beat. The course of arms control mirrored the rollercoaster of the larger relationship. First there was the landmark Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the “Interim Agreement and Protocol on Limitation of Strategic Offensive Weapons,” followed by multi-year negotiations culminating in a new “SALT II” agreement signed in 1979.
But that treaty was never ratified, falling victim to a series of blows to U.S.-Soviet détente beginning with the Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan. Soon the new Reagan Administration had launched an anti-Soviet campaign of confrontational rhetoric, military expansion, and covert action. By 1983, the Cold War was the coldest it had been in 20 years. Reagan introduced the “evil empire” motif for the first time and launched the elaborate missile defense vision known as Star Wars. The Soviets shot down a Korean passenger jet and the “Euromissile crisis” peaked as the United States responded to new Soviet nuclear missiles targeting Western Europe with new nuclear deployments of its own.
Even more alarming, though not publicly known at the time, were a pair of nuclear close calls in the fall of 1983 involving a computer glitch in the Soviet early warning system and an inadvertent escalation of alert levels prompted by a NATO exercise called Able Archer. Mikhail Gorbachev would later remark that, “never, perhaps, in the postwar decades was the situation in the world as explosive and hence, more difficult and unfavorable, as in the first half of the 1980s.” The grim atmosphere was not lost on Hollywood, which released feature films like War Games and Red Dawn and the nuclear holocaust television movie The Day After.
By this point, Churkin had arrived in Washington with a freshly minted PhD in history and steeped in the arcana of this heady superpower competition. Perhaps he even had a chance to watch the broadcast of The Day After from his home in the Northern Virginia suburbs. He told colleagues that he credited his famously tough skin in part to his experiences in those first days in Washington, encountering anti-Soviet audiences in the wake of the Korean Airlines incident.
At the same time, the posting was a gem for a young and ambitious diplomat. As his colleague in the embassy David Chikvaidze would recall, “We were like children who got into a political Disneyland.” Churkin’s relish for the role shone through in his public appearances, which included not only the Congressional testimony and university lectures, but also frequent media engagements, from Good Morning America to ABC News’ Nightline program.
Even the relatively new “Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network” sought him out for its call-in programs. His first C-SPAN appearance, in 1985, is a rhetorical master class in wielding an iron fist in a velvet glove. With impeccable manners and good humor, Churkin’s answers to callers’ questions slashed away at a variety of U.S. foreign policy shibboleths. On the Reagan Administration’s Star Wars missile defense initiative, he warned that it would end in an arms race in space, in the process providing a window into Russia’s chronic sense of strategic vulnerability:
. . . I think that maybe for Americans it’s going to be more traumatic than for anyone else. The thing is that we Russians are sort of used to being surrounded very close to our borders by weapons of other countries. I must tell you, it is a very nasty feeling, but we are kind of used to it. You Americans are not used to it at all. You know that there are systems, weapons aimed at you, but they are far away. And I think it’s going to be very uncomfortable to you when weapons appear over your head.
While this warning may have proved premature, another of his jaunty critiques retains a highly contemporary feel:
I think it’s high time you realize, and that will save you from many mistakes, that many of the troubles that the United States found itself in in this world were due to the fact that your people were unwilling to listen to the local people there, to the indigenous populations of those countries. They have their interests. Sometimes they want to do things which the United States would not like to see happen.
One caller on the program followed a litany of complaints against Soviet perfidy with the question, “I think you’re sort of Western-looking and a real sharp guy. How about defecting? We’d love to have you.” Churkin smiled and replied, “I’d advise you not to spend all your time waiting for that to happen, your life will be wasted, madam.”
But Churkin was much more than a sharp blade for Soviet propaganda. His gladiatorial streak was paired with a strong work ethic, and he was a key interlocutor for U.S. government officials aiming to get business done with the Soviet government. This was particularly true in the realm of arms control.3 In one remarkable appearance on Nightline on March 5, 1987, he joined President Reagan’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director Kenneth Adelman to defend the soon-to-be concluded (and now freshly topical) INF Treaty against its prestigious American opposition, represented by Kissinger colleague and Council on Foreign Relations fellow William Hyland.
One of Churkin’s last tasks in Washington was arranging a July 1987 visit to Moscow for a high-profile real estate developer in whom Soviet authorities had taken an interest: Donald J. Trump. This has led to some fevered but evidence-free speculation that Churkin was Trump’s KGB recruiter, and even that his sudden death a month after Trump’s inauguration was in fact the work of a Kremlin assassination designed to prevent his revealing the truth about Trump’s supposed compromise.
Back in Moscow as an aide to Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and then the official ministry spokesman, Churkin was fully occupied explaining glasnost and perestroika to foreign audiences. The week the Berlin Wall came down, it was Churkin who appeared on David Brinkley’s ABC News program to explain Gorbachev’s restrained response and to proclaim Soviet support for Eastern Europe’s “freedom of choice.”
As the political storm clouds gathered around Gorbachev, Churkin’s public remarks continued to take the historic developments in stride. After the election of Gorbachev’s rival Boris Yeltsin to the chairmanship of the Russian Republic’s Supreme Soviet, he told a Western journalist,
I have the feeling that Mr. Yeltsin has been a little bit carried away by his victory . . . [H]e is talking about virtual independence of the Russian Federation within the Soviet Union. I think he is going too far. . . My hope would be that as days go on and he is settled into his new office that he will act in a more responsible manner.
Needless to say, events evolved in a different direction. Only a year and a half later, the hammer and sickle descended the Kremlin flagpole for the last time. Reporter Mark Katkov recalled phoning Churkin at home the next day, only to have Churkin snap, “Call the Russian Federation,” and hang up. Nevertheless, just a month after that, Churkin was accompanying his new boss—President of the independent Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin—to his first American summit.
“. . . in Russia they are dealing with a great power and not a banana republic.”
On that January 1992 trip to New York with Yeltsin, Churkin stopped by the studios of the Charlie Rose show. Rose welcomed his “old friend” and quizzed him about whether he would stay in his job as spokesman for the new Russian Foreign Ministry. He replied “Well, that does not always depend on diplomats where they stay, and probably it would be a good time for me to contemplate moving.”
Indeed, within a month, he was appointed Ambassador to Chile, which, according to one friend, he regarded as an exile. But almost immediately, the young liberal Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev asked Churkin instead to take the position of Deputy Foreign Minister and Special Envoy to the former Yugoslavia. It was a promotion and a vote of faith in Churkin, but also a challenging account. Yugoslavia by 1992 had splintered into several independent states, with bitter ethno-sectarian conflict concentrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The Bosnian war was an early crucible for Yeltsin and his attempts to pioneer an independent Russian foreign policy. He was buffeted by two irreconcilable political imperatives. First, he and Kozyrev were committed to present the new Russia as a friendly and productive partner to the West. But second, powerful forces in Russian domestic politics, including in parliament, saw Russia as an historic ally of Serbia, bound by culture, Orthodox religion, and common Slavic roots to support her.
As the evidence mounted of disproportionate aggression and atrocities against civilians perpetrated on the Serbian side of the war, the focus of U.S. and other European powers’ intervention shifted toward restraining the Bosnian Serbs and the support they were receiving from the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. This trend put Russia’s cooperation with the West on a collision course with Russian nationalism back home.
In May 1992, when Russia voted in favor of sanctions on Belgrade in the UN Security Council, Yeltsin’s most vociferous parliamentary opponents called for his impeachment.4 In October, UN negotiators Cyrus Vance and Lord David Owen released their plan for the settlement of the war based on establishing a single, decentralized Bosnian state governed jointly by the warring parties. Yeltsin and his parliamentary opposition managed to agree on support for the Vance-Owen plan, as did Croatia, the Bosnia Muslims, and even President Milosevic. The last holdout was Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and the task of convincing him fell to Churkin.
In the event, no amount of cajoling was sufficient to induce a compromise from Karadzic, who refused to yield territory gained by his armies.5 In April 1993, the UN Security Council approved new sanctions on the Serbs with Russia abstaining from the vote this time. Kozyrev and Churkin walked a fine line, expressing disappointment but stopping short of condemning the Bosnian Serbs. Churkin commented dryly, “We will never embark upon confrontation with the world community over the map of Bosnia.”6
Nevertheless, Kozyrev and Churkin kept their shoulders to the wheel, trying fruitlessly to implement portions of the Vance-Owen plan even without Bosnian Serb support. Throughout the period, a pillar of Russian policy was the importance of the external parties avoiding use of military force. In February 1994, a crisis over this issue finally came to the fore. Bosnian Serb forces had laid siege to Sarajevo and were shelling it from fortified positions outside the city. A heated debate began in the Security Council over whether to initiate air strikes. Russia’s nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky, newly elected to a reconstituted parliament, declared that war on Serbia would be considered war on Russia.7
When a Serb mortar shell found its way into a crowded Sarajevo market, killing 68 people, the Western powers decided to act. To the Russians’ frustration, and in large part because of Russia’s opposition to the strikes, the West chose not to handle the operation through the Security Council. Instead, NATO issued an ultimatum to the Bosnian Serb leadership demanding that they pull back their forces around Sarajevo, surrender them to UN peacekeepers, or face bombing.
Karadzic initially refused to back down. But then, as tensions mounted and the ultimatum’s deadline was hours from expiration, the Serb forces suddenly withdrew from the countryside surrounding Sarajevo. The Russians, they said, had convinced them of the wisdom of compliance. With the promise of moving Russian peacekeeping troops in between Serbian and Muslim forces, Churkin had completed a stunning diplomatic victory. It was a great political achievement for Yeltsin, as well, whose press secretary crowed, “Not only did [Russia] return to the sources of its historic policy and role in the Balkans and protect Serbs, who are our kin in religion, culture, and national spirit, Russia also showed the scale of its influence in Europe and the world.”8
But the victory was fleeting. Only two months later, Karadzic’s forces were again threatening another massacre, this time at the safe haven of Goradze. Churkin returned to the war zone to negotiate another Serbian withdrawal, but could not turn the Bosnian Serbs from their course, and NATO finally followed through with air strikes.
Back in Moscow, Churkin’s frustration finally burst forth as he told the press:
We will continue to take the view that if the Serbs find the strength to turn to peace, then Russia will go on playing its part, but . . . the tail should not be wagging the dog. . . The Bosnian Serbs should understand that in Russia they are dealing with a great power and not a banana republic. Russia must decide whether to allow a group of extremists to exploit the policy of a great country to achieve their goals. Our answer is an unequivocal, ‘Never!’9
A Russian parliamentary leader quipped that the “halo of heroism around Kozyrev and Churkin” had disappeared.10 Seen from a broader perspective, though, it was not their failure in this instance that was most remarkable. Rather, it was that their delicate balancing act between placating the West and protecting Serbian allies actually allowed Russia to carve out for itself an independent and constructive role in the conflict, constrained though it was. Their efforts had breathed a bit of wind into the tattered sails of Russia’s image as a global power.
“An ambassador is a very important representative of his country, don’t you think?”
Beyond his celebrated professionalism, Churkin’s true sympathies and beliefs about politics and foreign policy are difficult to discern in the historical record. Indeed, this may be a sign of that very professionalism. Still, in the 1990s, it did seem to some that Churkin was a liberal, dedicated to building friendly relations with the United States and Europe. The influential scholar and politician Alexei Arbatov named Churkin as part of a “narrow circle of ministerial deputies and aides” to Kozyrev who occupied the most pro-Western position on the spectrum of Russian foreign policy actors. At the same time, Lord David Owen, the British politician and special envoy to the Balkans, thought that Churkin did not always see eye to eye with Kozyrev but never let it show.
Whatever his inclinations were, his next assignment after the Balkans would again put him at the center of Moscow’s challenging efforts to find its post-Cold War footing with the West. In 1994, he was appointed Аmbassador to Belgium, which entailed responsibilities as Russia’s liaison to NATO and to the European Union.
At that point, the expansion of NATO membership to former members of the Warsaw Pact was just emerging as a neuralgic issue in U.S.-Russian relations. The Partnership for Peace (PfP) was established to provide as inclusive a mechanism as possible for integrating former Eastern bloc countries into the governance of European security. Russia joined the PfP in June 1994. But it was clear that many countries recently freed from Soviet dominion had very different visions from Russia’s regarding collective security in the region. And President Clinton was already talking about the eastward expansion of NATO, which Russia opposed.11
Churkin found himself again in the diplomatic hot seat, tasked with pushing back on the prevailing tide of Transatlantic politics without spoiling Yeltsin’s continuing attempts to strengthen Moscow’s relationship with Washington and Brussels. In one early PfP contretemps in 1995, Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev pulled out at the last minute from a scheduled meeting at NATO headquarters with U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry. Churkin was sent in Grachev’s place to raise concerns about NATO’s plans for reinforcement of UN peacekeepers in Bosnia. When a reporter asked him why Russia had not been able to muster a more senior interlocutor for the U.S. Pentagon chief, Churkin winked, “An ambassador is a very important representative of his country, don’t you think?”
By 1997, expansion of NATO at least to the “Visegrad 3” (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic) was all but a foregone conclusion, and Russian objections had shifted further east, to the lobbying already underway to admit the former Soviet Baltic states, among others. At the same time, however, Russia-NATO relations took a significant step forward with the signing, amid much pomp and circumstance, of the “Founding Act of Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security,” better known as the NATO-Russia Founding Act. The agreement laid out formal mechanisms for cooperation and consultation, including a new “Permanent Joint Council” (later the “NATO-Russia Council”) for including Russia in select NATO deliberations. Churkin was the Council’s inaugural co-chair.
Robert Hunter was President Clinton’s Ambassador to NATO throughout this period and developed a close working relationship with Churkin. Hunter found Churkin to always represent Russian interests “correctly, precisely, and . . . honestly.” But he also further credits Churkin with playing an instrumental role in the progress achieved in Russian-NATO cooperation during those critical years, not just by being a professional partner, but also “by greasing the way in Moscow. . . When there seemed to be a chance to make things work with the Russians to everyone’s benefit . . . Churkin played a positive and useful role.”
Today, NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders is near the top of the Kremlin’s long list of grievances against the West and Exhibit A in Putin’s favored narrative of Russia as victim of Western encirclement. It is not clear what—or whether—Putin thought about Churkin’s role in “greasing the way” for cooperation.
“How many civilians must die . . .?”
Putin and Churkin were both born in 1952 and were both career-long public servants. When Churkin was appearing on national television in America, Putin was spying on foreign businessmen in Dresden. But then when Putin made his rather astonishing rise from obscurity to the Russian presidency in 1999 and 2000, Churkin was serving as Ambassador to Canada. For someone who only a few years earlier had been rumored as a candidate for Foreign Minister, it seemed a rather obscure, if comfortable, post. Churkin’s next job was similarly remote from the center of power, as the ambassador at large for Arctic policy.
In 2004, Churkin’s old friend Sergei Lavrov—who had once written him a birthday poem celebrating his Balkan exploits—became Russia’s Foreign Minister. Regarding Churkin’s Arctic job, Lavrov said, “it seemed obvious to me that it wasn’t enough for him.” In 2006, Lavrov succeeded in elevating Churkin to the UN job. By this time, U.S.-Russian relations were tense, to be sure, riven by a wide range of disagreements and suspicions. But perhaps even Churkin was not prepared for the degree to which his tenure would be dominated by conflict and confrontation between Washington and Moscow.
Only months after Churkin’s appointment, Putin delivered a landmark cold shower of a speech at the Munich Security Conference. With the likes of Angela Merkel and Robert Gates in the front row, Putin unfurled a compendium of grievances and criticism of American power, from stoking arms races to destabilizing the Middle East to fomenting revolution in Central Asia. The speech marked an inflection point in the Kremlin’s attitude toward cooperation with the West. Notwithstanding the warmer tone and selected areas of progress during the few years of overlap between the presidencies of Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama, Putin’s Munich broadsides ratified a downward trajectory for U.S.-Russia relations that continues today.
Churkin’s posture in the Security Council dutifully followed suit. He made expansive use of Russia’s veto power, tirelessly defended Putin’s military adventurism in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria, and eviscerated Western hypocrisy whenever possible. He is probably the only person in history with the distinction of having a monument dedicated to him in gratitude for a Security Council veto, an episode that perhaps exemplifies this longest, highest-profile, and final chapter of his career.
In 2015, the United Kingdom advanced a resolution in the Security Council to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the notorious massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of 8,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica. The resolution seemed at first to be a straightforward symbolic gesture, but Russia objected to its repeated reference to the killings as “genocide.” The International Court of Justice had formally classified the event as an instance of genocide, but Russia, Serbia, and the Bosnian Serbs had never accepted the judgment. Churkin called the resolution “confrontational and politically motivated,” and vetoed it, to widespread outrage. After his death in 2017, a Bosnian Serb organization built a monument with Churkin’s likeness inscribed with the words “Thank you for the Russian ‘no.’” It was erected in Sarajevo after efforts to place it in Srebrenica, itself, were legally blocked.
This was not the first time Churkin had wrangled in the Security Council over Russia’s definition of genocide. During Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, he had insisted on a rather more liberal conception of the term. The Kremlin claimed—falsely—that a few thousand civilians in South Ossetia had been killed by Georgian forces. “How many civilians must die for us to describe that as a genocide?” Churkin intoned in a strident Security Council speech. Asked later about the risks its military operation in Georgia posed to Russia’s international reputation he replied, “the genocide of Ossetians or Abkhazians is not a price we are prepared to pay for good relations with the United States or the West.”
This line of argument was part of a larger and long-standing Russian critique of Western justifications for its political and military interventions in other sovereign states. The American-led war in Iraq was the most salient example at the time. In this case, though, Russian officials compared criticism of Russia’s actions in Georgia to the 1999 U.S. and NATO strikes on Serbia over its operations in Kosovo. That war was one of the last nails in the coffin of the U.S.-Russian partnership forged by Clinton and Yeltsin, as well as another signal event in Putin’s historical narrative of Western powers determined to humiliate post-Soviet Russia. Those attacks over Kosovo had also been publicly justified on the grounds of protecting civilians, just as Russia claimed over South Ossetia.
Though almost a decade old at the time of the Georgian war, Russia’s Kosovo scars had been freshly reopened earlier that year when Kosovo formally declared its independence from Serbia, a status quickly recognized by the United States and much of Europe. Moscow wasted little time in exploiting the Georgian war to further highlight the perceived Western double standard. The day it recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, Churkin told the press, “We have been warning that [Kosovo’s declaration of independence] is providing additional emphasis to all those who are working for their independence.”
Sovereignty and genocide, it seemed, were flexible concepts for Moscow. But in this regard, Churkin seemed to be suggesting, Russia was simply operating by the same geopolitical principles as its Western counterparts, no more or less.
Churkin and the Through Lines of Russia in the World
So was Churkin really just an apparatchik, after all? Smoother and more skilled than most, but ultimately as cynical and self-interested as the Soviet system that created him? Clearly, he was willing and able to serve as the mouthpiece for some of Putin’s worst excesses. When asked recently how he felt about the role that his old colleagues Churkin and Lavrov had played in Putin’s foreign policy, Yeltsin’s pro-Western Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev answered, “Professionally, I understand, but morally, it pains me. A person always has a moral choice, and it’s painful to see that my people are like this.”
All the same, there is some evidence that Churkin was not a true believer in either Putin or the course he had set for Russia. In Samantha Power’s view, he may have “valued Mr. Putin’s restoration of Russia’s relevance on the global stage, but would have preferred peaceful methods.” Power also describes Churkin’s frequent work behind the scenes to build compromises on some of the most contentious issues. Tellingly, this included even pressing the Kremlin to get to “yes” on the very Srebrenica genocide resolution for which his “no” won him a monument in Sarajevo.
American journalist Tom Brokaw has claimed that Churkin was privately critical of Putin’s policies and even called his administration a “kleptocracy.” Despite Moscow’s staunch defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, there were multiple reports of Churkin’s efforts in 2012 to broker a deal with Security Council colleagues that could have led to Assad’s departure. Only a few months before he died, he told a friend and fellow diplomat, “It’s not easy always being required to be the villain in the play every day, walking into the UN in that role that everyone sees you in can wear you down.” To some degree, clearly, he was playing a role, just as he had as a child, albeit on a much bigger and more consequential stage.
But why, ultimately, should we care whether a late Russian diplomat really believed some, all, or none of his talking points? The reason is that Western policymakers could really use a figure like Churkin to serve as a notional but practical benchmark for gauging the opportunities and limitations of future Russian partnership.
In thinking about how best to engage with Russia, it is hard not to focus on the particular qualities of Vladimir Putin, who has ruled for nearly 20 years and centralized power in monarchical fashion. But Putin is not only a shrewd operator and strong avatar of Russian nationalism; he is also corrupt, authoritarian, and prone to aggression. In some quarters of the foreign policy intelligentsia, the temptation is strong to equate these characteristics of “Putinism” with fundamental, enduring elements of Russia’s political identity. Other observers—no less sophisticated—can see just over the horizon to a Russia prepared to abandon its pretensions to unique status and ready at last to join a liberal European society and security order.
However, for those in the West who find the latter vision too rosy and the former too bleak, Churkin offers a useful model for what a middle path could look like. Even on such a path, the West would need to grapple with challenging but fundamental, enduring features of Russian foreign policy. These features are evident across Churkin’s career and throughout the tumultuous sweep of Russia’s history. Three principles stand out: Russia’s self-image as a great power with “privileged interests” in its region, the importance of multilateralism in the relations between great powers, and the broad moral equivalence of the behavior of great powers.
When Putin infamously remarked that the Soviet Union’s collapse was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, few believed that affection for Marx or Lenin or even Stalin was on his mind. Rather, it was Russia’s claim to be one of the great centers of global power that had disappeared almost overnight. That was the loss to be mourned most deeply. Rebuilding this self-image has been a key driver of Russian policy ever since, not only under Putin.
When Churkin appeared on the Charlie Rose show in January 1992, only a month had passed since the sudden and spectacular unraveling of the Soviet Union. Rose asked him how it felt to know that Russia was no longer a superpower and that the United States is the dominant power in the world. A smile crept across his face as it would the tutor of a well-meaning but wayward child. “Well, Charlie, I think Russia is a superpower,” he said gently, before Rose could finish, though he allowed that he’d “never been particularly fascinated by the name ‘superpower.’” Churkin clearly saw his own role in the Balkans in the 1990s through the lens of great power diplomacy, as both his tireless negotiations and his slow-burning frustration with the Bosnian Serbs made evident over time.
At the same time, Russia has always advocated the notion that the conduct of great powers gains legitimacy and strength when exercised in concert with their peers. This vision is perhaps best exemplified by the European concert of powers that prevailed during the early and mid-19th century.12 This notion of “multipolarity” became a centerpiece of post-Soviet Russian foreign policy in the 1990s, articulated most prominently at the time by Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov.
Key to this is seeing Russia as one of the political “poles” in the multipolar international system. Russian advocacy of mutipolarity and multilateral diplomacy is usually couched in cooperative or egalitarian terms, invoking what scholar Richard Sakwa has called a “democratic system of international relations.”13 As Putin put it in 2016, “I certainly hope that . . . the world really will become more multipolar, and that the views of all actors in the international community will be taken into account.”
This emphasis is evident in Churkin’s career, especially in his Bosnian tenure. Russian policy throughout the war there regularly sought out Security Council approval and sponsored rounds of multilateral negotiations. The Contact Group, which was established in the spring of 1993 and became the focus of international efforts to forge a Balkan peace plan after the failure of the Vance-Owen plan, was originally a Russian idea. In the same vein, Churkin vigorously protested unilateral steps taken by individual Western countries or by NATO. And throughout his UN stint, Churkin unfailingly hailed the unique importance and integrity of the Security Council as a multilateral decision-making forum.
Of course, a simpler explanation for Russia’s multilateralism than long-standing philosophical commitment is that it creates a pretext for Russia to offset its power deficits relative to its competitors. The UN Security Council veto, a tool that Churkin wielded with abandon, is only the starkest practical example of this dynamic. But these different explanations do not contradict so much as reinforce each other. Dedication to multipolarity is both expedient and sincere.
Finally, Churkin is also an exemplar of Russia’s enduring contempt for the moralist streak in Western foreign policy. For Russia, each country’s sovereignty encompasses its political culture, not just its territory. By this logic, the legitimacy of a state’s exercise of international power should be respected regardless of others’ views on those traditions. This translates into considerable frustration with America’s evangelism of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.
It also makes Russians acutely sensitive to evidence of hypocrisy in Western policy, a proclivity that Churkin elevated to an art form. As Russian scholar Dmitri Trenin put it, Churkin’s “line of defense was never ‘We are holier than thou.’ His line of defense with the U.S. was ‘Look at your track record.’” In one of his 1980s television appearances, he articulated one of the most common Russian complaints; that American policymakers
try to draw what they think is our legitimate sphere of influence. And it happens to end somewhere about 200 miles from Moscow. The rest of the world falls into the sphere of vital U.S. interests. And Moscow is OK, it’s Russian. Some other cities and towns around Moscow are also Russian, the rest of it has nothing to do with the Soviet Union and it is the sphere of vital interests of the United States and the United States has the right to say what should and should not be done.
America’s inconsistent advocacy of democracy is another favorite Russian theme. Charlie Rose was fond of pushing Churkin on the shortfalls of Russian democracy under Putin’s rule. In a 2010 interview, he told Churkin, “There are some people who worry . . . that democracy is not all that it should be in Russia.” Churkin replied with a smile, “You know, democracy is not what it should be, full stop.” After Putin was re-elected as President in 2012 amid evidence of widespread voting fraud, Churkin received Rose’s pointed questions with less equanimity. Citing one of America’s most infamous (to Russians) transgressions of the early post-Soviet era—the Clinton Administration’s support for Boris Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996—Churkin complained, “What is important for you? The democratic process or who is going to win? You pick and choose. . . You have to get rid of this habit.”
Another preferred target is the West’s allegedly selective sanctification of sovereignty and self-determination. As already noted, Russia’s Georgian intervention in 2008 generated a storm of criticism from Washington. Churkin was having none of it, sharply inquiring of the U.S. Security Council representative, “Have you found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or are you still looking?” Only a few weeks before Churkin’s death, when the United Kingdom’s UN ambassador Matthew Rycroft called for Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine, Churkin told him: “Return the Malvinas [Falkland Islands], return Gibraltar. Then your conscience might be clearer and you could discuss other topics.”
These kinds of attacks are undeniably self-serving for a Kremlin leadership with great incentives to deflect criticism of its own sins. And yet, they hold more than a grain of truth. While the Kremlin is manifestly a leaky vessel for charges of hypocrisy, this line of critique of Western foreign policy is hardly limited to Russians. Indeed, it is widely shared, including by many within the Western elite.
Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, for example, is best remembered today for its prescient forecast of salafi terrorism’s emergence as a dominant international security problem. However, one of its central arguments was that “Western belief in the universality of Western culture . . . is false, . . . immoral, . . and dangerous.”14 Huntington notes that the West prevailed in international competition not through “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”15 Russians certainly do not.
Recent years have seen renewed criticism of America’s pursuit of “liberal hegemony” among some high-profile American academics, such as Barry Posen, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt.16 In these pages, Adam Garfinkle has lamented that “whenever Americans saddle up in maximal ideological gear . . . they somehow manage to persuade themselves that they are the least ideological folk on the planet.”17
When these complaints come from Vladimir Putin, they are easy to dismiss. But they will remain long after Putin is gone. They seemed to be close to Vitaly Churkin’s heart, a man who lived half of his adult life in America, Canada, and Western Europe, sent his children to Western schools, and inspired admiration and loyalty from countless colleagues and friends in the West.
No matter what the future holds for the evolution of Russian politics, Western leaders will still need to confront all of these elements of Russian foreign policy. The mirror that Vitaly Churkin held up to the West could be distorted, to be sure, but it was usually still a partial reflection of reality. Western leaders need not agree with this deeply felt Russian line of criticism in order to recognize its sincerity and seriousness, despite its often being hidden behind paranoia about American omnipotence and imagined Russophobia. For Churkin, at least, the criticism was clear-eyed: gamesmanship in part, but also something like tough love.
In 1880, the great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky delivered a famous speech in which he offered a vision of Russia’s destiny in the world as “universality, won not by the sword, but by the strength of brotherhood and our fraternal aspiration to reunite mankind.”18 This may seem a bit much, seen through the veil of Russia’s history, freighted as it is with tragedy and despotism. Indeed, Dostoevsky acknowledged his idea as “ecstatic, exaggerated and fantastic.”
But even a century of gulags and purges and repression and conquest does not entirely erase the “fraternal aspiration” for comity among nations. This is a Russian tradition, too. Imagine by comparison how foreign audiences see America’s reverence, for example, for the slave owner Thomas Jefferson’s soaring invocations of freedom and equality. Such “myths” of national identity are not so much false as they are complicated. So, while Dostoevsky’s dream is still not in the cards, neither is Russia necessarily fated to endure forever Putin’s autocratic and cynical world view.
Western leaders working painstakingly toward greater partnership with Russia should always remember this. And they should remember Vitaly Churkin. His legacy will be forever tarnished by his defense of Vladimir Putin’s wars and lies. But at the same time, in the words of one fellow diplomat, he also “epitomized what great diplomacy can look like as an art form—when attached to a deeper sense of purpose to find that sometimes elusive, but incredibly important, common ground among nations.” Seeing this quality in Russia from the outside will help nurture it on the inside—an outcome much to be desired.
1For example, Michael McFaul, “Is Putinism the Russian Norm or an Aberration?” Current History, October 2018. See also Allen C. Lynch, “What Russia Will Be,” The American Interest, October 25, 2018.
2Thomas Graham, Jr., Disarmament Sketches: Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law (University of Washington Press, 2002), p. 91.
3Graham, Disarmament Sketches, pp. 176-177.
4Michael Fitzsimmons, “The New Russia and the Balkan War: A Study of Domestic Change and Foreign Policy,” unpublished thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, May 1996, p. 24.
5Karadzic did sign on to the plan in May 1993, but only days later, the Bosnian Serb parliament rejected it, a result almost certainly pre-ordained and planned by Karadzic.
6Izvestiya, April 21, 1993.
7The Daily Telegraph, February 18, 1994.
8Fitzsimmons, “The New Russia and the Balkan War,” p. 29.
9Izvestiya, April 20, 1994.
10Russian Press Digest, April 28, 1994.
11James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999).
12See Bobo Lo, Going Legit? The Foreign Policy of Vladimir Putin, Lowy Institute, September 2018; and Alexandr Golts, “Determinants of Russian Foreign Policy: Realpolitik, Militarism, and the Vertical of Power,” in Stefan Meister, ed., Between Old and New World Order: Russia’s Foreign and Security Policy Rationale (German Council on Foreign Relations, September 2018).
13Richard Sawka, Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
14Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 309.
15Huntington, p. 51. Also see Daniel E. Burns, “Sam Was Right Where It Counts,” The American Interest (November/December 2018).
16Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press, 2014); Michael J. Mazaar and Michael Kofman, “Rediscovering Statecraft in a Changing Post-War Order,” Texas National Security Review, May 15, 2018; John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (Yale University Press, 2018); Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
17Adam Garfinkle, “Can Americans Count to Three?” The American Interest, March 9, 2018.
18Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Pushkin Speech,” June 1880, as translated by Alan Kimball.
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