Russian officials feel heat of EU sanctions
Russia’s ’emperor’ is a recluse who shows affection only to his dog, writes Tom Parfit
THE EU reached an interim agreement on Friday to impose the first economic sanctions on Russia over its behaviour in Ukraine — but scaled back their scope to exclude technology for the crucial gas sector.
The EU also imposed travel bans and asset freezes on the chiefs of Russia’s FSB security service and foreign intelligence service and a number of other top Russian officials, saying they had helped to shape Russian government policy that threatened Ukraine’s sovereignty.
FSB director Alexander Bortnikov and Mikhail Fradkov, a former prime minister who now heads the foreign intelligence service, were among 15 Russians or Ukrainians and 18 companies and other organisations named in the EU’s latest sanctions list.
Also sanctioned were the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who the EU said had made statements supporting Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.
The 28-nation EU toughened its stance towards Moscow after last week’s downing of a Malaysian airliner, killing 298 people, in an area of eastern Ukraine held by Russian-backed separatists.
European Council president Herman van Rompuy wrote to EU leaders asking them to authorise their ambassadors to complete an agreement by Tuesday.
Van Rompuy said the proposed sanctions package “strikes the right balance” in terms of costs and benefits to the EU and in its flexibility to ramp up sanctions or reverse them over time. But he said the sanctions on access to capital markets, arms and hi-tech goods were likely to apply only to future contracts, leaving France free to go ahead with the controversial delivery of Mistral helicopter carriers being built for Russia.
The narrowing of the proposed measures highlighted the difficulty of agreeing to tough sanctions
They ‘strike the right balance’ in terms of costs and benefits
among countries that have widely different economic interests and rely on Russian gas. Said European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso: “I call on Russia to take decisive steps to stop the violence and genuinely engage in peace plan discussions.”
A further sanctions list could be agreed as early as tomorrow under new criteria targeting companies and people who support Russian decision-makers responsible for annexing Crimea or destabilising eastern Ukraine, said Van Rompuy. — Reuters
HE rises late, breakfasts on curds and porridge and then heads for the swimming pool. His appears to be an ascetic life: no alcohol, no fatty foods and plenty of sport. He recently divorced from his wife of 30 years and vehemently denies rumours of trysts with a former gymnast. Work begins after lunch every day and continues until the early hours of the morning.
In a recent sketch of Vladimir Putin’s routine, the writer Ben Judah likened him to a modernday emperor, surrounded by courtiers and friends from St Petersburg who call him “the Tsar”.
“His life has become ceremonial: an endless procession of gilded rooms,” wrote Judah, who spent months interviewing the leader’s former staff. “His routine is parcelled up into units of 15 minutes and planned for months, if not years, ahead.”
Putin spends his days at NovoOgarevo, his capacious estate on Rublevka, the birch-lined highway that runs west out of Moscow. Few have told of his otherwordly life, but details dribble out: he has a personal food-taster; his ministers approach him like meek schoolboys; he breaks off to play ice hockey with his bodyguards in the evenings.
The president takes his time — foreign leaders can wait for hours for an audience while he watches them on a video link writhe with boredom outside his office. Journalists spend whole evenings lolling in an an- teroom with a billiards table. Putin disdains computers and reads intelligence reports from thick leather-bound folders.
Aides may be held at bay, but Koni, his cherished Labrador, is never far away, greeting Putin as he emerges from the swimming pool, or begging a titbit from the breakfast table. The president — who adores animals — has a pet goat and a miniature horse called Vadik in the grounds of the sweeping estate, which is hidden behind 6m-high walls.
He rarely travels to the Kremlin, and if he does, it is in a highspeed convoy that barrels down Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where the police block all surrounding streets to ease its passage.
To many, Putin, 61, appears an isolated figure. Hubert Seipel, a German filmmaker who made a documentary about the president two years ago, found him trapped in a security bubble. During a break in an ice hockey game, the Russian leader looks lonely and exhausted, even old: a far cry from his macho image of a bare-chested fisherman, fighter pilot and horse rider.
It is tempting to see Putin as an eccentric dictator, a mix of Miss Havisham and Emperor Haile Selassie, sequestered with sycophants in a desolate mansion, yet with the levers of power still at his fingertips.
Some observers believe Putin is now in the trickiest position since first assuming office 14 years ago. Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis have begun to bite and more are pend- ing in the wake of Flight MH17, the Malaysia Airlines jet that crashed in eastern Ukraine last week, allegedly shot down by pro-Russian separatists backed by the Kremlin.
Senior Russian figures have pooh-poohed the measures. Vladimir Yakunin, head of Russian Railways and a frequent visitor to Novo-Ogarevo, is fond of saying US and EU sanctions are like mosquitoes in Siberia. “They’re a nuisance, but life goes on,” he said.
This week, Denis Manturov, Russia’s trade minister, called the sanctions “peanuts”. “If one market closes, another opens,” he said.
Andrei Kudrin, the liberal former finance minister, is less sanguine. He confessed that he was taken aback by a “fundamental shift” in Russia’s political landscape caused, in part, by the conflict in Ukraine.
“There are forces in the country who have long wanted to create distance, who want isolation, one could say, a kind of self-sufficiency,” Kudrin told a Russian news agency. “Today that has all fallen on fertile ground and I am amazed at the scale of anti-Western rhetoric that has appeared.”
Kudrin was ousted from the government three years ago, but he still meets Putin, a sign that the Russian leader has not completely purged the liberal clan of economists and lawyers from his entourage.
Yet the siloviki — serving and former security and military veterans in his circle — will point to his approval ratings as a sign of reward for his hardline stance.
Alexei Navalny, the popular anti-corruption campaigner, is under house arrest and Sergei Udaltsov, a radical opposition leader, was jailed on Thursday for “organising mass riots”. Dissent has fizzled out.
Georgy Bovt, a sharp observer of Russia’s political scene, said Western sanctions would end up hitting “ordinary people” hardest, whereas the oligarchs around Putin would receive some form of compensation for their lost investments abroad.
“Sanctions will not erode his rating,” said Bovt. “On the contrary, the Russian people will consolidate around him, perceiving the country as a besieged fortress, as they have done many times throughout history.”
Dmitry Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, a think-tank, believes it a mistake to see the Russian leader as out of touch.
“It’s true that Putin is a tsar and he makes his decisions on his own without relying on others. Most of all, he trusts the reports from his special services,” he said. “He treats his subordinates as a tsar does and of course it is difficult to get to him. But it is wrong to see him as an isolated figure.
“As someone who controls the country through its bureaucracy, he is constantly on the move, travelling inside the country as well as outside, meeting many kinds of people. And he has a very good sense of the instincts of the majority.”
And yet, the mustiness of Novo-Ogarevo — its ageing Soviet phones preserved in cabinets, its panelled rooms — speaks of retreat and intransigence.
Branded an international pariah in the West, Putin does not feel guilt or remorse as he contemplates the Ukrainian plane crash during his morning swim. He believes he had no other option but to back the separatists in the east of the country.
“Most of all, Putin feels insulted,” said Bovt. “Insulted because he reached out to the West after September 11 and was rejected. Insulted because of Nato expansion, because the EU refuses a visa regime, because of double standards. Relations with the West will develop along a Cold War 2 scenario. Neither side is willing to make a compromise. I get the impression everyone has lost their minds and the Malaysia Airlines crash is not enough to bring them to their senses. Putin is in a strong position. He will be leader for many years to come.” —