Putin began by embracing the west. Now, he wants revenge

When Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin prime minister on 9 August 1999, few Russians knew much about him. In early television appearances he came across as mousy, shy and awkward, a man unaccustomed to the limelight from which his previous career in the KGB had shielded him.

But within weeks he revealed a character trait that would become the defining feature of his rule – ruthlessness. His first memorable phrase was his threat to wipe out terrorists “even if they’re in the shithouse”, and within weeks he had launched a terrifying war against separatists in Chechnya that would leave tens of thousands of civilians dead.

Twenty years on, as Russia and the west teeter towards confrontation, it is hard to remember that Putin started out as an avowedly pro-western leader. George W Bush and Tony Blair rushed to glad-hand him, and Putin himself stood in the Bundestag proclaiming at length and in fluent German that Russia’s destiny was in Europe. But western leaders were appalled by his brutality in Chechnya, and by the first signs of his antidemocratic tendencies, which included his muzzling of critical television stations.

Putin’s fatal flaw, it seemed to me, was his utter inability to see that there was a contradiction between being a ruthless autocrat at home, and the values of the western civilisation to which he (at least at that time) paid lip service.

Some argue that he was never seriously pro-western, that the overtures masked ulterior motives and KGB-inspired schemes to dominate the world. But I think that is mistaken. When I worked as a consultant to the Kremlin in the earlier part of Putin’s rule, I had many meetings with senior officials and have no doubt that they regarded themselves as “western” and even as democrats.

The problem lay elsewhere – in Putin’s inability to understand the west’s wariness and increasing hostility as his internal policies revealed him to be no democrat. I discussed this with his advisers: how can you hope to persuade the west you are a good partner if you refuse to properly denounce the Soviet era, if you crack down on protests and stifle the media? They could not connect the two. And so the west naturally grew more and more suspicious, and Putin in response grew first disappointed, then angry and ultimately downright hostile. Since that first pro-western phase, I think it is possible to distinguish three further stages of “Putinism”.

The second began in about 2003 and peaked in February 2007, when Putin travelled to Munich to deliver a blistering attack on the United States’ pretensions to rule the world as “sole master”. He was annoyed that instead of reciprocating his gestures (including his help in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan), the Americans had not only ignored his robust opposition to the war in Iraq, but were pressing ahead with plans for a missile shield that, in Putin’s view, together with Nato’s expansion, directly threatened Russia’s security.