Russians used to think we wanted to make money. Now they think we want to rule the world.
The man sitting closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska will be Yuri Ushakov, his top foreign policy adviser and ‘America guru.’ During the summit, he’ll be a largely silent presence, perhaps occasionally providing some information or clarification to his boss. After the summit, he will explain Putin’s objectives going forward to foreign leaders and the western media.
Ushakov spent 10 years in Washington serving as Russia’s ambassador to the United States and for much of that time, I’d have lunch with him every few months at his favorite Italian restaurant on P Street, near Dupont Circle. Of course, I wouldn’t actually know where we would meet until the last minute; we would agree in advance on the time but not the location. The morning of our lunch his assistant would call to tell me where to go. I always assumed Ushakov wanted to minimize the possibility of our table being bugged by either American or Russian security agents. All the same, he assumed that I would share information about our lunches with my former colleagues at the Department of State or the National Security Council. Which, of course, I did.
Looking back, I can see now how my interactions with Ushakov reflected larger trends in U.S.-Russian relations.
I don’t recall any hints of Ushakov ever disagreeing with the Kremlin’s foreign policies, though in explaining them to me he would try to make them less antagonistic and hold out the possibility of finding common ground. Good diplomats everywhere are like that, of course, but in Ushakov’s case, loyalty to “the party line” was inculcated in him and others of his generation — he’s now 78 —when they joined the Soviet diplomatic service.